OCR Text |
Show A LONDON FOG AND ITS RESULTS. The London Telegraph thus discourses about London fog; "We are only just beginning to estimate the terrible effects of the great fog which lasted, with few and brief intermissions, from November, 1879, to the first week in February, 1880, and which enormously increased the death-rate of that period, besides laying a formidable train of consequences not even yet fairly disposed of. None of the other large towns of Great Britain suffered to any great extent comparable with the visitation that lingered so long and so calamitously in London. Asthma is the disease which appeared to be most directly influenced in its mortality by the continuous fog. In the first three weeks of the present year, when the dense curtain lifted for a time, the deaths from this malady dropped at once to about thirty per cent below the average, having previously risen, in the middle of December, when the fog was severe, to forty-three per cent above the average. Then, again, on its return at the end of January, and it continuance with increased density through the first week of the following month, the deaths from asthma rose at once to the alarming height of 220 per cent over the average, falling again, when the fog finally disappeared to as low a point as they had stood at for a considerable time. Of course, all lung diseases followed the fluctuations of this extraordinary atmospheric condition, but none of them equaled asthma in close obedience to the varying density, or, unhappily, in prompt obedience to the beneficial change." |