Influenza

Since late November influenza has been increasing throughout western Europe at so alarming a rate that public health officials have come to fear a pandemic, a world-wide occurrence of this disease, such as happened in 1918-19. Already Switzerland, Germany England and France have been severely hit. At Nantes, France, the undertakers reported last week that they were four days behind with their burials. Their crogue-morts* complained of sore feet and demanded subsidy for new shoes. In Italy the authorities claimed they have no epidemic. But no gloss was smeared over the situation in Spain, Ireland, Scotland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Greece, Norway, Sweden and Denmark. In Denmark King Christian and Queen Alexandrine were bedridden, and in Spain 200,000 politically less important people were afflicted./-

In the U. S. last week only 1,863 cases were reported by the U. S. Public Health Service. Said Assistant Surgeon General Claude Connor Pierce: "We have the influenza scare every year, and we find that it is present again in a mild form. We admit we are powerless to act against it, because the actual cause of influenza has never been determined. The advice we give anyone suffering from a cold or the grip at this time of the year is either to stay in bed, or at home, and not to circulate the germ."

*Professional mourners who in frowsy dignity accompany the hearse.

/-Epidemiologists insist that world-wide plagues of disease begin in Asia and then work towards Europe and the Americas. So the League of Nations has placed health watchers in the principal Asiatic coast cities to report by wireless the local health status. These reports are compiled and then relayed to worried, watchful Western officials. But this influenza spread caught the League unawares by starting, apparently, in Spain, just as did the influenza pandemic of 1918-19. Last week the League relayed wireless health reports of European, as well as of Occidental countries.