MAORI CONSUMPTIVES.

Auckland Star, Volume LVII, Issue 302, 21 December 1926, Page 10

MAORI CONSUMPTIVES.

QUESTION OF TREATMENT. HEAVY BURDEN ON BOARDS. (By Telegraph—Special to "Star.") 1 HAMILTON, this day. The Waikato Hospital Board has decided to make a further strong protest. to the Health Department against having to bear the cost of maintaining indigent Maoris in hospitals and sanatoria. At yesterday's meeting of the board a letter was received from a white nurse asking for authority to send a Whakarewarewa Maori girl, who is very ill with consumption, to the Otaki Sanatorium. The writer said the girl, who was 20 years of age, was one of a family of nine, who lived in one room at Whakarewarewa. Statistics, the nurse said, showed that 50 per cent of the I natives at. Whakarewarewa were consumptive. She would have applied for the girl's admission to the sanatorium earlier, but she had difficulty in overcoming her relatives' prejudices against the white man's treatment. The board has forwarded the necessary application forms, and when these are filled in the I patient will be sent at the board's expense to Otaki.