Tuberculosis

Tuberculosis, dread disease, drew concentrated attention from doctors, public health workers, social hygienists and Red Cross contributors during the past fortnight. Last week the National Tuberculosis Association met in Washington, immediately after the International Union against Tuberculosis, which had met there the previous week.

Tuberculosis has been known and its effects described since the time of the Greeks. Even then they called it consumption. But its cause was unknown until, in 1882, Robert Koch (1843-1910) discovered the Bacillus tuberculosis. At about that time, 1879-80, there were approximately 163,000 deaths annually (326.2 per 100,000) in the U.S. Koch foreshadowed the method of preventing the disease. Since then unceasing preventive work has reduced its ravages in the U. S. until last year, as Secretary of the Treasury Mellon, who is responsible for the work of the U. S. Public Health Service, told the International Union, there were only 76,605 (81.8 per 100,000) deaths in the 36 states who report their health statistics to the Government.

The disease attacks every kind of vertebrate--fish, reptile, bird and animal. Domesticated animals acquire it--dogs, cats, monkeys, rabbits, guinea pigs, hogs, cattle. They, like humans, may suffer variously from tuberculosis of the lungs (phthisis, pulmonary tuberculosis), of the intestinal tract, lymphatic glands, serous membranes, bones, skin, brain, Fallopian tubes, uterus, spleen. But whether, except in the case of milk-yielding cows, they can transmit tuberculosis to humans is still a moot point in medicine.

The tuberculosis bacillus is a tiny rod-shaped germ, which causes peculiar little translucent, greyish nodules the size of millet seeds. The phthisis victim loses weight, wastes away. He suffers from a fever that fluctuates with the time of day.* Prevention should start in childhood, the period when a predisposition to the disease may be developed, Professor Gaetano Ronzoni, of Milan, said to the International Union. Later, it is possible to cure a patient with persistent, attentive care.

What renders humans susceptible to tuberculosis is not specifically known. The bacilli exist everywhere in the world. They gambol up human noses and down human throats. They nest in tonsils and proliferate in bronchioles. They take rides on the invisible droplets that each human exhales as he breathes. Whole colonies of them are ejected with sputum onto sidewalks, into street cars, in hotel lobbies. They are particularly thick in tenements, barracks, orphan asylums, workhouses, penitentiaries. But most people are able to resist them, to kill them as they grow.

Other folks lose their resistance-- in unhygienic surroundings, from exhaustive work (athletics included), from dusty occupations (mining, ash dumping, cotton handling, grinding, polishing), from unrelated diseases, from mental depression.

Prevention lies with maintaining sound health, cure with nourishing foods, plentiful clean air, abundant sunshine. (Ultraviolet light, from quartz lamps has proven efficacious substitute for sunlight.)

*For a long time there has been doubt whether or not, in women, menstruation influenced the fever af tuberculosis. But Dr. Morris M. Weiss, 25, at Montefiore Hospital, by analysis of several hundred fever charts, has apparently proved that there is no such inter-relation.