CHILD NUTRITION
MEDICAL ASSOCIATION URGING INQUIRY PROBLEMS OF INFANT LIFE (By Telegraph—Press Association.) WELLINGTON, This Day. The Dominion Council of the British Medical Association at a recent meeting resolved to approach the Minister of Health, the Hon P. Fraser, and ask for an investigation to be made into child nutrition in New Zealand. Dr J. P. S. Jamies, Nelson, president of the New Zealand branch of the association, stated in a telephone interview. The honorary general secretary of the association, Dr P. P. Lynch, declined to give further details, or the reasons which had prompted the association’s action. It is understood, however, that it was prompted by information laid before the association by certain specialists in child welfare, who drew attention to the high incidence of malnutrition, approximately 7 per cent, among primary school children in New Zealand, and the excessive commonness of dental troubles throughout the community, probably more prevalent here than anywhere else in the world. These troubles were ascribed largely to diet deficiencies in infancy. It is understood, too, that the percentage system of infant feeding widely advocated in New Zealand has been questioned by the specialists as having been superseded elsewhere in the world on the grounds that it involved certain dietetic deficiencies and led to malnutrition in some cases. It was stated that while New Zealand had a very low rate of infantile mortality, she had also a shockingly low average of physique among school children, in a country where they led an outdoor life and where actual starvation through poverty virtually did not exist.
It was a surprising aspect of the matter that in New Zealand maluntrition was very frequently encountered in well-to-do, better-class families where poverty or inability to care for the children could not possibly apply. In nearly every case of the sort, the source of the trouble was stated to be under-feeding in infancy through either ignorance or misguidance. For some time past there had been a feeling in a growing section of the community that present ideas on child welfare merited reconsideration, and comparison with the latest developments of the kind overseas.
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Wairarapa Times-Age, 16 June 1938, Page 6
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352CHILD NUTRITION Wairarapa Times-Age, 16 June 1938, Page 6
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