Off Year

Uncomfortable with a cold in his nose last week was President Roosevelt. AAAdministrator Chester Charles Davis, FERAdministrator Harry Hopkins, House Majority Leader William Brockman Bankhead also had colds. Influenza and pneumonia had incapacitated so many Government officials and employes that Washington doctors broadcast warnings of a potential epidemic.

In Texas, Governor James V. Allred was laid up by influenza.

In New Jersey an eminent victim of influenza was Professor Albert Einstein. Some of the lawyers and witnesses in the Hauptmann murder trial at Remington had the sniffles, but not severely enough to impede proceedings more than a day. Elsewhere in New Jersey, in the southern part, colds and influenza forced the closing of many a school. Some Pennsylvania and Delaware schools, across the Delaware River from affected New Jersey communities, also had to close because so many children and teachers were ill.

Chicago had a real influenza scare when the commandant of a veterans' hospital quarantined 1,750 patients, 1,500 employes.

South Carolina reported 2,000 cases of influenza last week. Estimates put the number of unreported cases at 10,000 more in that State.

The country over reported 7,000 cases of influenza to the U. S. Public Health Service the first week of the year. That was three times the number of cases reported during the same week of January 1934, but only a small fraction of the 72,241 cases reported the first week of 1933. By last week doctors, who heretofore had been negligent in reporting their mild cases of influenza, hurried to report such numbers that Surgeon General Hugh Smith Cumming was led to say: "Influenza is probably more prevalent than at any time during the last five or six years. But I hesitate to call this an epidemic." The three-year periodicity of influenza epidemics still seems authentic. The time for the people of the U. S. really to worry will be the winter of 1935-36.

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