The Daily News. MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 2, 1912. THE WHITE PERIL.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LV, Issue 90, 2 September 1912, Page 4

The Daily News. MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 2, 1912. THE WHITE PERIL.

The North Canterbury Hospital Board appears to have conceived quite a wrong interpretation of its functions last week, wlifn it was dealing with the ease of ail applicant for admission to tlio consumptive sanatorium. About four months ago, it appears, an immigrant, with his wife and family, reached New Zealand from Great Britain, and were admitted to the country in the ordinary course. It has now been ascertained that the wife was treated for consumption, but not cured, in an English institution, and now, the family, having fallen upon evil days, the husband is desirous of sending his wife to the Cashmere sanatorium, which is under the control of the Board. With a large family to support, he is, however, unable to pay the fees, and asked that the woman should be admitted as a nonpaying patient. But the Board, in its wisdom, has decided that the woman having been improperly admitted to the country, in evasion of the immigration laws, she cannot be admitted as a nonpaying patient. It would be hard to find a more ridiculous and illogical illustration of administration by Bumbledom. The woman should not be made to suffer for the laxity of the Department which controls such matters, and the commonest humanity demands that she should receive immediate treatment. It is little short of brutal that she should be denied relief on a pure technicality. But, serious as her case is, having to face both poverty and disease, the menace to the community is even more serious. Presumably, the sanatorium, which ie maintained by public money, has for its primary object the isolation of consumptive cases, along with their prevention and their cure. As it is, the Board, in its penny-wise and pound-foolish attitude, is allowing her to remain at large and sow the seeds of her insidious disease among her neighbors. The Board, in fact, is helping to create the very dangers that the institution and the immigration regulations are intended to avoid. It is to be hoped that the Government will insist upon her immediate admission to the sanatorium, and at the same time will make searching enquiries as to how she came to be admitted to the country. Incidentally, the whole treatment of consumption in the Dominion might very well be exhaustively reviewed by the Government, who could learn many lessons in this respect from

older countries. In Germany, for instance, the crusade against the disease is associated: intimately with the State insurance scheme, and the public dispensaries which have been established in the cities. The Insurance Boards attend to the financial aspects of the evil, the dispensaries give advice and provide practical remedies, and the sanatoria receive the eases that require expert medical treatment. The municipal authorities, too, play their part. The town of Charlottenburg, for instance, spends about £15,000 a year on providing an excellent dispensary for consumptives, treatment in hospitals and sanatoria, forest resorts for adults, and forest schools for the young, holiday colonies, and grants towards rent, milk, beds and bedding. "The whole of the town's organised activities in connection with the treatment of consumption," writes a correspondent of the London Daily Chronicle, "may be said to originate in the dispensary, which serves at once as a centre for diagnosis, advice and preliminary assistance, and as a clearing house from wkieh the victims of this fell disease are drafted to the special institutions suited to their condition at the time of the first examination. The dispensary works hand in hand with other allied departments of municipal administration, such as the health department, the school department, and the poor law department." The result of these measures, which are associated with a scheme of housing reform, is that consumption is steadily decreasing in the city. There is much in this general scheme to commend it to the State, and the municapilities in New Zealand, and its broad usefulness is in striking contrast to the narrow and perverted action of the Canterbury Board, to which we have referred.