DRUGS & INSTRUMENTS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 29 December 1943, Page 4

DRUGS & INSTRUMENTS

MANUFACTURE IN AUSTRALIA GREAT EXPANSION DURING WAR PERIOD (By Telegraph—Press Association—Copyright) (Received This Day, 11.55 a.m.) CANBERRA, This Day. The Australian production of surgical instruments has been expanded from an annual value of £5.000 before the war to one of more than £300,000. This is revealed in a report on the work of the Commonwealth Medical Equipment Control Committee, which was established early in the war to ensure an adequate supply of medical equipment for the Services and civil population. The report claims that the manufacture in Australia of certain sulpha drugs helped the Australians to achieve victory in the Papua campaign. The drugs substantially reduced the incidence of dysentery, which was rife. As a gesture of sympathetic co-opera-tion, the first Australian-made antiscorbutic vitamin C was made available to New Zealand troops. There had been an increasingly heavy demand for vitamins, the report stated, and the local schnapper and shark liver oil industry was being considerably expanded. Many essential vegetable drugs, including morphine, digitalis and ergot, were being produced from Australian plants.