Influenza In The Islands

Memories of Pneumonic Plague

Letter to the Editor.

INFLUENZA has again come ashore from some ship at Papeete and is spreading through the islands. That it has assumed the magnitude of an epi demic, the closing of the schools bears witness.

By rare good fortune this outbreak is not of the type of disease designated ••Spanish Influenza”. If it were, it would have stalked ashore with none to hinder it; for maladies under the title of “in fluenza” are not included in the inter national lists of disease to be quaran tined.

Like the Holy Roman Empire—which was “neither holy nor Roman nor an Empire”—Spanish Influenza is neither Spanish nor influenza. Anyone who had perused the medical reports of the out break in Manchuria in 1910, recognised this pestilence, masquerading under the name “Spanish Influenza”, as pneumonic plague.

Under the circumstances of war, the doctors and those in authority (if, in deed, the authorities were ever told the truth) were afraid to reveal the true name of the disease, and it was allowed to go forth, with no quarantine restric tions and under a false title, to slay its millions in every country in the world.

That should have been a warning.

But, after twenty years, we look through the international lists of quarantinable diseases to discover that the most tragic, the most destructive epidemic in history, has taught our all-wise international medical profession no lasting lesson.

I am, etc.,

Rerehiri-I-Amaura.

Tahiti. 30/9/1938.