New Mexico State Record

"FLU" EPIDEMIC WILL BE MILDER

If There Is Recurrence It Will Not Be as Severe as Last Winter.

NO POSITIVE PREVENTIVE

Previous Attack Brings Immunity in Percentage of Cases-Enforcement of Sanitation and Avoidance of Personal Contact Necessary Precautions.

(Authoritative Statement Issued by United States Public Health Service.)

Probably, but by no means certainly, there will be a recurrence of the influenza epidemic this year. Indications are that should it occur, it will not be as severe as the pandemic of the previous winter.
City officials state and city boards of health should be prepared in the event of a recurrence.
The fact that a previous attack brings immunity in a certain percentage of cases should allay fear on the part of those afflicted in the previous epidemic.
Influenza is spread by direct and indirect contact.
It is not certain that the germ has been isolated or discovered. And as a consequence there is no positive preventive, except the enforcement of rigid rules of sanitation and the avoidance of personal contact.
A close relation between the influenza pandemic and the considerably increasing pneumonia rate at any rate prior to the fall of 1918 is recognized.
It is now believed that the disease was pretty widely disseminated throughout the country before it was recognized in its pandemic state. This failure to recognize the early cases appears to have been largely due to the fact that every interest was then centered on the war.
Above are the important facts developed by the United States health service after a careful survey and investigation of the influenza pandemic of 1918-1919, carried on in every state and important city, and even in foreign countries.
No one of the many experts of the service would make a more positive forecast of the all important question. Will there be a recurrence? All agreed, however, that a recurrence was not unlikely, and in the case of the known facts, that it would be wise to be prepared, more with a view of being on the safe side than actually anticipating danger.
The following excerpts from the government report are published for the benefit of the public and health workers in the hope that this will serve to set at rest the daily publication in the newspapers of statements, which on one hand are calculated to lull the public into a sense of false security and on the other to unduly cause alarm.
Contrary to the opinion expressed frequently during the early weeks of last year's pandemic by a number of observers, the studies of the United States public health service indicate that the epidemic was not a fresh importation from abroad. Careful study of the mortality statistics of the United States shows that there were a number of extensive though mild forerunners of the pandemic during the previous three or four years. The epidemic was generally of a mild type and has since been almost forgotten. It occasioned, however, a noticeable increase in the recorded death rate from pneumonia.
Rise in Mortality.
In the spring of 1918 there was another sharp rise in the mortality rate from pneumonia. In the larger cities of the Atlantic seaboard these increases occurred during January, February and March. In the rest of the country, especially the central and western states the increases occurred in April and during which pneumonia mortality is generally on the decline.
This course was sufficient to indicate a strong departure from the normal. The increased mortality rate extended until May and in some areas longer.
This occurrence has, it is believed, a definite significance in relation to the influenza epidemic. In the United States in the spring of 1918, a number of definite local outbreaks of influenza were observed:
The rise in mortality from pneumonia, a this very similar type of disease, in the spring of 1918 is so sudden, so marked and so general throughout the United States as to point very clearly to a definite relation. Everything indicates that the increased mortality from pneumonia in March and April of 1918 was the consequence of a beginning and largely unnoticed epidemic of influenza, the beginning in this country of the pandemic which, developed in the autumn of that year.
In the British cities the epidemic manifested three distinct waves-the