Show kaahu kA AAU let our motto be GOOD HEALTH BY DR LLOYD ARNOLD professor of bacteriology and preventive medicine university of illinois ollege college of medicine L TWENTIETH CENTURY DISEASES the more we study the history ot of health and disease through the ag ages M the more we are convinced that the different ages aes have their different diseases in biblical times we read much of leprosy in the fourteenth and fit centuries there was the black death in colonial times and t the he early nineteenth century rabies was a dreaded disease and diphtheria and typhoid were scourges urges as late as twenty years ago I 1 but medical science has conquered these and a number of other infectious diseases and we were be beginning inning to think thank that when we had conquered the common cold and other respiratory diseases the heart and kidney ailments rheumatism and cancer and upsets of the intestinal and nervous syE systems we should have the human race pretty well on the road to health and then along came two comple completely tel y new diseases infantile paralysis and sleeping Ble sickness these are diseases of the brain and spinal cord they are our twentieth century diseases so far they have us completely baffled F for or all the work we have done on them ithem we still know very little concerning them infantile paralysis made its appearance in the nineties of the last century land band became epidemic after 1000 steeling sleeping sickness was first observed in the apost war period it followed the influenza wave of 1918 1018 and 1919 then came a new type of sleeping sickness encephalitis not nearly so fatal nor so disabling as the other type encephalitis made its first appearance in this thi country in paris carls ill in the summer of 1032 1932 then in st louis and western illinois in 1933 1033 and again in illinois in the summer of 1934 1034 the first thing a scientist does in studying a new disease Is to learn what animal Is susceptible to that disease land and then to determine whether the disease Is caused by germs cef mg that can be seen with a microscope or by germs so infinitesimally small that no microscope yet made Is po powerful enough to reveal them this second type of germ I 1 Is s called a virus medical laboratories throughout the country have been to inoculate all kinds of animals with infantile paralysis and sleeping but so far it is only the monkey that has proved susceptible and i since monkeys are expensive animals there are only a few research centers that have the funds to carry on this experimentation the scientists working on these two anew new diseases have been been able to determine that they are caused by two invisible viruses but more than that we dont know we also believe that the common cold and influenza and smallpox chickenpox chicken pos pox measles and mumps are caused by viruses but wi whether fether there is any family connection be tween all these virus diseases we chavent yet determined bacteriologists are now beginning to speak of virus flora they think that the people of various sections of the world and of a country have a virus flora in their noses and throats that lis as different from the virus flora in la another lenother section of the world as the plant flora of one section is different from the plant life of another section now we each get used to our own particular virus flora and when we are well we are quite happy with it it is ig when we have a breakdown in health that our own virus flora can give us trouble also we get used to living with the virus flora of our neighbors when they are well it Is when they are sick that xe we are liable to get too much of their cold virus or their measles virus for our own good during the world war several millions of young and adult men were collected from the tour four corners of the earth and transported to western europe here they lived in intimate contact with each other in crowded quarters they were subjected to extreme arid and grueling gruell ng mental and physical strain there could not help but be an exchange of individual virus flora by coughing sneezing hand handshaking go etc nothing like such an exchange had ever happened in the history of the world before the universal Influenza wave of 1918 and 1919 was a result of this mixing one good thing about the twentieth century diseases is that they do not seem to be contagious in the same sense as diphtheria scarlet fever and typhoid fever there Is seldom a second case in the same household C worn paver union |