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The sub-committee approved the form of leaflet prepared
for their consideration, as follows:—
THE PREVENTION OF CONSUMPTION.
(An Infectious and a Preventable Disease).
The Vestry, as Sanitary Authority. desire to call attention to the subjoined
statement prepared by the Medical Officer of Health.
INTRODUCTORY.
Consumption and other forms of tuberculosis cause one death in every eight
deaths in this country, and of all deaths in the United Kingdom between
the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five, in the prime of life, nearly onehalf
are due to consumption. In Great Britain, at the present time,
probably a quarter of a million persons are suffering from consumption
alone. This means a vast amount of suffering and permanent ill-health,
unfitting the sufferers, more or less, for the discharge of the duties of
life. And yet the disease might be prevented by the adoption of means
for the improvement of the general health of the community, and for
the removal of insanitary conditions in houses, etc.: in many cases, moreover,
it is curable by proper treatment, especially in the early stages.
The causes which predispose to consumption are such as bring about a low
state of health: the susceptibility to it, often inherited, may also be
induced by unhealthy conditions of life, or evil habits; as overcrowding
in ill-ventilated, dirty, dark, damp dwellings; bad or insufficient food;
intemperance; sensual excesses, infectious fevers, and other illnesses.
Consumption is not now regarded as hereditary, but as being actually caused
by the presence in the body of a term or microbe, called the tubercle
bacillus, derived from some person or animal suffering from consumption,
or some other form of tuberculosis. This germ, the infective
material, under favourable circumstances, as in dark, dirty, damp places,
and in ill-ventilated or dusty or overcrowded rooms, workplaces, etc.,
may live outside the body for long periods of time: it abounds in the
spit coughed up from the chest of consumptive persons; it may exist in
the flesh of tuberculous animals, and it is present in the milk of cows
suffering with tubercular disease of the udder. Such milk, specially
dangerous to infants and young children, is often the cause of the
wasting diseases peculiar to that lime of life.
But the great cause of the spread of consumption is the expectoration or spit
of consumptive persons, in which the germs exist in enormous numbers.
Whilst wet there is little harm in the spit, but it is very dangerous if
allowed to fall on the ground, or otherwise to become dry; for then,
floating in the air as dust, it is inhaled in breathing, and so becomes the