Manchester Democrat

TUBERCULOSIS CURABLE.

By Dr. H. M. Biggs, New York's Health Officer.

Tuberculosis is infectious and communicable, but a tuberculosis patient may live in the same room, for days or years, with a healthy person without danger to the latter, if proper precautions are taken. The chief danger is from bacilli thrown out from the respiratory tract. In advanced cases as many as three thousand millions are thrown out in a single day. They are inhaled as dust, and lodge in different tracts in the system. If conditions are favorable to growth they multiply there. But the general insusceptibility to tuberculosis is very great. It is only at certain times and under certain conditions that a large proportion of persons are susceptible.

Tuberculosis is absolutely preventable and its preventability is simply putting into effect simple rules of conduct. It is a question solely of scrupulous cleanliness in regard to expectoration and disinfection of surroundings which have once housed the disease.

It is not only preventable, but curable. It is the most insidious of all diseases. A specialist may declare no indications of it whatever and in a few weeks it may be manifest to any one. When there is any question one examination is not enough. Where a cough continues for more than six or eight weeks, in a large majority of cases, there is back of that cough a tuberculosis focus. When any one talks to you about chronic bronchitis and continued colds make up your mind that in a majority of cases a tuberculosis focus is back of it. Then is the time to establish this fact, for then it is easily curable; later it may not be.