Saturday, December 7, 2024

Gas School Children with Chlorine to Prevent Respiratory Infections? Dec. 8, 1924

Would Gas School Children Two or Three Times a Week. . . Army Expert Believes Chlorine Would Save Many Attacks of Infectious Diseases

Atlantic City, Dec. 8—Lieutenant Col. Edward B. Velder, chief of the medical research division of the United States arsenal at Edgewood, Md., addressing the annual convention of the New Jersey Sanitary Association at Haddon Hall tonight, advocated systematic “gassing” of school children with chlorine gas two or three times a week, while they are in their class rooms, as a preventive of colds, whooping cough and other diseases of the upper respiratory tract.

Colonel Vedder, who has been experimenting with the gas with the object of making it a beneficial agent of medicine, declared that out of 1,029 persons 64 per cent were reported as cures, 30 per cent as improved and six per cent as no change.

“I think,” he said, “we estimate that from one quarter to a third of the diseases that incapacitate school children are infectious and acquired through the respiratory tract. It is quite practicable in any school having a ventilation system to introduce chlorine into the main ventilating duct. This could be done an hour or two three times a week under the supervision of the school physician.”

From the front page of the Concord Times, Dec. 8, 1924.

newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sn91068271/1924-12-08/ed-1/seq-1/#words=DECEMBER+8%2C+1924

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