Arizona weekly enterprise., 1882-04-01
Is Consumption Contagious !

If our medical journals were to ai1s nounce the steady approach to this country-say from China-of an ill-uu- derstood, painful and usually fatal mall ady, which If once established among us would certainly kill half million of our citizens every year and ultimately carry off one in every five of the entire population; 1t is safe to presume that the announcement would not be calmly received. As one man, physicians not less strenuously than laymen, we should demand the most rigorous quarantine against the infected country. No effort would be accounted too heroic, no pre- caution too costly, to shield our country from so disastrous an invasion. And if there were any doubt as to the specific nature of the threatened plague or of the mode of It's transmission or inception, neither our medical and sanitary socie- ties nor the Government would rest tin1 til competent commissions were sent td investigate the matter. It @onld be ac- counted criminal int - Qnce on the part of medical and sanitary authorities to neglect to make concerted and per sistent effort to discover the causes and conditions of the plague, and how to
 
 or to cure its victims when attacked. Would the urgency of the case be diminished in any respect by the cir cumstance that the supposed invasiof had already become a fact accom- ! plished9
 At first thought, any one would re- ply Not in the least rather on the contrary for the evil in the latter case would be actual, not threatened merely; and the loss or saving of half a million lives 8 year is matter of the gravest national importance. Yet 1t is a singular fact that, while we should be thrown into panic if half million lives were threatened with new disease, we ac- cept as inevitable, almost with indiffer- ence, the certain killingof thatnutnber of people every year by an old and familiar malady. And our medical authorities tell us, without twinge of professional pride, that they really do not know pos itively how consumption Is induced and transmitted, or whether 1t is communi- cable from the sick to the well or not i, and, worse yet, they confess without blushing that they do not contemplate any special or general effort to have such n1omentous questions critically in- vestigated
 When half million of discontented natives of Europe tl1rong to our shores in single year we do not fail to appre- ciate the importance of the gain, both immediate and prospective. When a larger number of our own citizens are cut off untimely by a disease which, while it destroys them, transmits a leg acy of sickness and too often early death to their descendants, we mourn our in dividual losses, but make no adequate effort to put an end to the national loss by urging or aiding the scientific deter imitation of its conditions, causes and remedies. Already one in every five of our population dies of consumption, and the indications are that the conditions Of our civilization tend to increase the death rate from this cause. If the disease is infectious, as many believe, the multi plication of cases may sooner or later reach point-if its progress is un- checked-at which a perpetuation of our race and the civilization developed by if will become impossible Other races and civilizations have disappeared, leav- ing no explanation of the secret of thei, decline. Others, We have good reasons for believing, have been e1terminated by plaques peculiar to them, developed in all probability, by something peculiar to their modes of living.
 That there is any imminent danger oi so disastrous a result to our race and civ ilization from the increase of consump tion, no one butsan alarmist would sup pose; still it remains an impending pos. sibility, more especially if there is any error in the common belief that the dis ease Is not contagious or infectious. .- iSeieatifc American.