OCR Text |
Show ----- . HOW THE GRIPPE IS SPREAD Gathering of Large Crowds in Badly Ventilated Places Is One of the Chief Causes. Tt may be interesting to a considerable consider-able number ot persons to know that the handy term, "la jrippe," which is quite as expressive if deprived of the "la" and reduced to four letters, conies to us from the French verb "gripper." meaning to seize, clutch or nab. and all three of these terms in English are required fully to express the condition of tlia victim of the dread visitation. Kven among physicians there is a tendency ten-dency to indetiniieness in naming diseases dis-eases of the naso pharyngeal organs, nearly every kind or severe cold, influenza, in-fluenza, coryza or catarrh being called grippe. Dr. Charles Halpin Nammack, visiting physician of Bellevue hospital, says, in the New York .Medical Record, that the present epidemic, which is a national affair, has depended for its spread and success on three main factors: fac-tors: The tremendous variation in climatic conditions; the crowding together to-gether of great masses of people in badly ventilated cars, moving picture shows and other halls, and the contamination con-tamination of the air which they have been obliged to breathe, by the coughing, cough-ing, sneezing and spitting of those already al-ready suffering from some form of respiratory re-spiratory infeclion, usually of the common com-mon cold type. L'nder direction of the New York board of health the police of that city arrested in one week more than 1 GOO persons for expectorating In public places. Of these, 1,400 suffered conviction and fines. It is noted that epidemics of grippe as a clinical entity have been recognized for almost a hundred hun-dred years, but it was not until 1892 that the bacilli were discovered lu the sputtum of the sufferer. |