The Manawatu Herald. TUESDAY, MARCH 12, 1907. HEALTH IN NEW ZEALAND.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXIX, Issue 3759, 12 March 1907, Page 2

The Manawatu Herald. TUESDAY, MARCH 12, 1907. HEALTH IN NEW ZEALAND.

It is refreshing to be again reminded by dependable statistics that New Zealand has the lowest death rate in the world. This country has long enjoyed this enviable distinction. Natural conditions may have something to do with the comparative immunity from active disease, but it is likely that the immunity is largely owing to the fact that the pioneers of the colony were necessarily healthy, hearty, and free from physical imperfections. No sane person would have thought of coming to this colony in the early days unless he was sound in wind and limb. Then a freedom from crowding, inability in the earlier days to destroy the health with luxurious foods, and very necessary and arduous exercise helped to lay the foundation of a national health that is to-day the best thing of its kind on the globe. Of course in the days to be the death rate will rise. Crowded cities and the poverty that always comes with crowded cities will raise the death rate for us, although it is remarkable what sanitary science and municipal wakefulness can do to minimise dangers to life. Thus it is that British large towns have a less death rate than continental or American cities and that the greatest city of them all, London, is also the healthiest of any of the first-class cities of the world. Science fights disease, disease that is unknown except in civilisation, and science is doing noble service in trying to stifle the disease that claims the most victims in New Zealand —consumption. ‘ It is not too much to say that if every person in New Zealand was as intelligently alive to the gravity of consumption and a belief in its absolute cure, consumption would be wiped out as a cause of death in Government statistics in two decades, and would decrease every year during those twenty twelvemonths. The necessity for consumptives to continue to earn a

living while in the first and later stages of the disease, is an absolute wrong. If Nature is flouted she hits back very hard. Nature kills a consumptive very quickly if that person hides himself in a gloomy room and fills himself up with all sorts of horrors which exist merely that someone shall make a fortune out of suffering humanity. Nature gives her medicine free —sunshine and light air. She isn’t an expert at putting up rubbish in a bottle and she expects people to eat food —not patent rubbish. Fighting disease is mainly a matter of education, and this brings us down to the little children of the schools whom the State very rightly intends to look after medically in the future. This should be the function of every State, for the children are any State’s most valuable belonging. Many children in other parts of the world never have a square meal in all their childhood. No engineer ever yet expected a locomotive to drag a thousand tons of loading without consuming fuel. Yet it seems to have been thought possible and not a crime to allow children to fight the battle of life with insufficient or ineffective fuel to drive their machinery. This is the great and unforgiveable crime in two score countries of the earth, and we in New Zealand may pray God that such a crime shall never lie at the door of this land or its people. The noticeable degeneracy of most white folks in these days emphasises the need for the consideration that all thoughtful Governments bring to bear on the question. The fact that at the present time New Zealand has the lowest death rate in the world, need not, and will not prevent the State from endeavouring to still lessen the rate. That other sad fact that despite such favorable conditions tubercular disease and the equally dreaded [cancer, are very common in this country should still further stir the great mass of medical men in the colony to research that they may have an effect in lessening the scourges. That New Zealand possesses many men vyho are single-souled enough to fight abnormal conditions apart from the mere question of personal gain, there is no doubt. New Zealand is small enough to lend herself readily to experiment and a natural desire on the part of the people in high places to attract attention to the doings of a speck in the Pacific is the reason for many struggles lor reform that strike the outsider as iconoclastic and the work of dreamers. It the ideals of any man in this country are realised and by their realisation they result in a better life for even a few people, that man s work is not in vain. If by the careful examination and treatment of school children the State is able to produce a better human animal freer from disease, the State accomplishes a nobler object than if it built a thousand miles of railways. The value of perfect physical human beings to any country that will have at some time or other to put its men against the best of other nations is inconceivable, and if only on the score of selfishness and a fear of possible consequences, it is the State’s duty to regard its population as the paramount consideration. An army of one thousand men free from disease and in the most perfect physical health is of greater value than an army of two thousand liable to sickness and so a tax on the healthy ones. The best way to bring about general immunity from disease is of course to educate the people to methods of life that will give disease the least chance. That human beings stick to old fetishes and superstitions, and are as easily gulled as ever, is evidenced by two news items recently appearing. One was in relation to a mad stampede of people in Melbourne. They believed the earth was running through a tail qf a comet! The other was the announcement that Voliva, the successor to that criminal fraud, Dowie, had induced numbers of people to found a new Zion City in America. You can’t tell fools like that that the best physician is natural clean living. They won’t believe you. They would rather have three pennyworth of something that stinks of Voliva’s blessing or some other idiot’s prayers. The man of science is plumb up against as palpable a darkness nowadays as was in the middle ages, except that the darkness isn’t quite general but .has a few streaks of illumination here and there. It is the inestimable privileges of New Zealand men of light to pierce that darkness even as their brothers in the Old World are trying to pierce it.