Preventive Medicine: New York City. 1943

New Zealand Listener, Volume 10, Issue 256, 19 May 1944, Page 22

Preventive Medicine: New York City. 1943

(Written for "The Listener’ by DR.

H.

B.

TURBOTT

Director of the Division

of School Hygiene, Health Department)

health in New York City, 1943, It is interesting to see how that city guards its health. Syphilis and gonorrhoea have long been a health problem in New York. One of the valuable weapons in combating venereal disease is the city law requiring blood tests before marriage and before birth. Applicants for marriage licences found to have syphilis must secure medical treatment till cured, or rendered noninfectious, before they’re allowed to marry. Syphilitic pregnant women, too, may secure proper medical treatment to safeguard their unborn infants. In addition to driving people to treatment and providing some free if necessary at clinics, New York takes long-term preventive measures against passing syphilis to the next generation. In our country we haven’t been bold enough yet to require pre-marriage and prenatal blood tests-which is a pity! New York combats tuberculosis by casefinding activities, and, to this end, mass X-rays surveys have been used extensively. Half a million men, women and children have been X-rayed by the Health Department in the last 10 years. In every hundred 1.4 have had active tuberculosis. Proper treatment was arranged for these. The diagnosis of tuberculosis is offered free of cost to those who can’t afford private physician’s fees. Free examination, including chest X-rays, is obtainable at the Department’s tuberculosis clinics. Approximately 89,000 such free examinations and X-rays were made at the clinics during 1943. Low cost or free hospitalisation or sanitorium care is provided as needed. In our country we also fight tuberculosis by case-finding, but ~ are handicapped badly by the inability to carry out mass X-rays of susceptible groups of people. Typhoid fever used to claim an average of 665 deaths annually in New York during the early years of this century. It caused six fatalities in 1943. Here’s evidence of the successful use of preventive medicine good food and water supplies, good sanitation, coupled with preventive inoculations at outbreaks. We can point to similar success against typhoid in our own country. Diphtheria, alone, caused 1920 deaths in 1900 in New York. The Health Department in the ’twenties of this century campaigned for mass immunisation of New York children against diphtheria, The immunisation was offered to all infants and children and the immunising material given without charge to private doctors. Diphtheria immunisation is now accepted by the people of New York as a necessary procedure for their children. As a result, New York’s diphtheria death rate has declined steadily till, in 1943, only 16 children in that city of 7,600,000 people died from that disease. I have shown you how a big city | controls venereal disease, tuberculosis, smallpox, typhoid fever and diphtheria, as examples of preventive medicine in practice. And you should see from it how, where people herd together in cities, an ounce of prevention bears dividends in pounds of cure. . | HAVE just read a review of public