CARE OF PUBLIC HEALTH.

Taranaki Daily News, 19 November 1918, Page 5

CARE OF PUBLIC HEALTH.

PERILS AND PRECAUTIONS. SOLDIERS' NEW VIEWPOINT.

The subject of canitary conditions was discussed by Sir James L'ricliton Browne in (hiis presidential address at the annual conference of the Sanitary Inspectors' Association in London. He said good houses were a fundamental condition of good homes, a£1(1 good homes turned out good citizens. The well-appointed private house was the best antidote to the bedizened public-house. Impurity without was apt to breed impurity within. Healtih. was a better investment than War Bonds.

Referring to the safeguarding of public health, Sir James said preventive medicine, in conjunction with antiseptic Burgery had accomplished the saving of about 300,000 lives a year on the British fronts alone. Disease as a factor in the army death-rate had almost been wiped out, so that the amount of sickness in the camp 3 had been barely half what it was in barracks in times of peace. "In no department of our affairs will reconstruction be more thorough than in all that relates to sanitation," the continued. "The men who have passed through the furnace of the war will come back to us refined in many respects, and in no way will they sliow their altered temper more t'han in demanding better health protection than they have heretofore enjoyed. They have learnt some salutary lessons. Statistics, perhaps, do not appeal to them, and they mig&t remain cold to the statement that in three years among 3,000,000 men on our Western Front we have had only 2000 caßes of typhoid fever, instead of the 300,000 which, according to precedent, we should have had; but they lhave seen for themselves there that disease has fastened in a special degree, and with a special virulence, on the email uninoculated minority of their comrades, and t'hey will henceforth turn a deaf ear to anti-vaccination diatribes. They have not relished chlorinated water, and have grumbled because it spoilt the taste of their tea, but they have come to realise that it is preferable to diarrhoea and dysentery, and have been impressed by the strenuous efforts put forth in all circumstances to protect their drink from contamination, and so will be reconciled to the water-rate and look after the cistern and the kettle when they return home. They have tad a new insight into entomology, and have been taught the disease-carrying propensities of the flea, the louse, the mosquito, and the fly in connection with tihe plague typhus and trench fever, malaria, and various intestinal disorders, so that henceforth they will cheerfully take part in the crusade for the extermination of these dirty and irritating pests, and will protest against the existence of breeding beds for one of tliiem—the fly—in proximity to their dwellings. They have proved the _ invigorating power of regular and sufficient meals of wholesome food, and will not be content to revert to the short commons for themselves or their families, or the adulterated viands which were the lot of some of them, at any irate, before the war. The general effect of the war on our men who have taken part in it will, I believe, be not only a certain moral elevation, but a changed outlook on life, and a better understanding of the conditions that made it. worth living. They will appreciate as~ they lliave never done before the utility of hygiene and of medical science, and regard with increased respect tho -doctor and the sanitary inspector.