PROCEEDINGS OF SECTION I. 371 
6.—THE VENTILATION OF BUILDINGS. 
By B. A. Smiru, M.C.E. 
7—SOME POINTS OF INTEREST IN: CONNECTION 
WITH INFLUENZA. 
By J. W. SprinetHorre, M.A., M.D. 
| Abstract. ] 
[The full text of this paper may be found in the “ Inter- 
colonial Medical Journal of Australasia,” April, 1900.) 
AFTER a period of apparent absence, the mild infectious catarrhs 
or scattered sporadic cases, which have alone represented 
influenza, are suddenly replaced by a severe epidemic, which 
attacks a very large proportion of the community ; the severity 
declines, returns, and finally becomes pandemic before once 
more sinking back into comparative insignificance. And yet 
each great attack is always recognisable, and the main cha- 
racteristics remain unaltered. 
1. Historically the pandemic of 1847, which furnished the 
last classical description of influenza prior to recent times, 
also visited Victoria (according to the report of the late Dr. 
W. Campbell), and may have left behind it the “ bilious fever,” 
which was more or less confounded with typhoid. No severe 
epidemic is again reported until our visitation in the middle 
of 1885—locally known as “fog fever’—but present also 
throughout Australasia, Polynesia, and Melanesia, and return- 
ing yearly up to the pandemic of 1890. This latter, all 
English, American, and Continental authorities trace back 
only to Hongkong in 1888, and Pokhara in May, 1889. But 
the three years’ antecedent prevalence in the Southern Hemi- 
sphere still remains to be reckoned with, and it is largely to 
again draw attention to this historic neglect that this paper 
has been contributed to the present meeting of the association. 
2. The germ factor. The bacillus which causes the disease 
is known to abound in the air passages, and to be found also 
in the blocd and organs under certain conditions. It does not 
appear to have a nidus in the soil, and the air seems simply a 
medium for transit. Perhaps, like the diphtheric bacillus, it 
continues in the naso-pharynx of individuals in attenuated 
forms, becoming pathogenic under favourable influences. 
3. The atmospheric factor is still unknown. The only 
terrestrial condition that can apparently be casually connected 
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