The Nome daily nugget., 1937-12-08
AWAY WITH MATTRESS
 YEARS
(By Ann Hollinshead)

the large negative on his desk and into the face of the young man beside him.
 It's tuberculosis all right. Ear ly stages, though, so you've got a good chance. But where did you get it"
 That same question, in much the same setting, is being asked of patients throughout this coun- try at least once every five min utes.. At that shocking rate phy- sicians in the United States are still diagnosing patients as tuber- culosis, and putting that search ing question to each one of them WHERE did you get it?"
 For tuberculosis is now known to be contact disease-a disease caused by microscopic organism and passed on to others through the sputum and nasal discharges of the sick. Everyone who con- tracts if has been in association with someone who has it. No one can possibly get it in any other way. Separate the sick from the well, say our leading tuberculosis specialists. and the disease will at last be conquered.
 From it's insidious nature, how ever, the sick do not always know that they are sick. Here, then, is the first task of the health edu- cator-to make people aware of the four danger signs of tubercu- losis, namely the persistent cough, uneNplainable fatigue, loss of weight and indignation.
 "I wish I'd known what I do now" is the lament of thousands of patients in sanatoria today, as they recall some friend or sweet heart who showed these early symptoms but who thought noth- ing of them. If Bill had gone to the doctor when l begged him to, l myself would not be spending these long mattress years here," says Bills wife in many a sana- toriunn where she is lying on her back, curing of tuberculosis. She has learned the nature of the dis ease and the fact that with close contact, infection is inevitable.
 The following true story is told by the superintendent of one of our largest tuberculosis Sanatoria. Dramatically it warns us all of the need for constantly being on our guard against this age-old de- destroyer of human life. A child of four years died of tuberculosis recently and the health authori- ties in an effort to locate the source of infection. examined, every member of the immediate family as we'll as all relatives in the larger family circle, total of thirty-fiv people. But not one of them was found to have the disease, and the authorities were much perpleXed until reports came to them that three other young children living in the same beautiful apartment buildings had been diagnosed by their physi clans as being in the early stages of tuberculosis. Here was clue that might lead to the contact. Someone with tuberculosis must have been in close touch with all of these young children. After careful and tactful investigation, that someone proved to be the motherly unmarried woman in her hate forties who was always willing to care for other peoples children when pressing errands or bridge parties called their parents away. Apparently hale and hearty, no one but a ohysi- clan with an X-ray machine would have suspected her. But actually the X-ray film showed her to have a far advanced tuberculosis of both lungs.
 In a recent editorial in HYGEIA, popular health publication of the American Medical Association, Dr. w. w. Bauer warns us that in spite of the progress made in the last thirty years when tuber- culosis has been brought from