BRITISH AND FRENCH STANDARDS.

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 142, 18 June 1929, Page 6

BRITISH AND FRENCH STANDARDS.

The recent French demand that visitors from Britain should be vaccinated has led Mr. A. G. Gardiner, the well-known English journalist, to make a telling comparison between the health records of the two countries. He says: "It may seem odd that the French should assume the role of mentor to us in health matters. The mortality tables of the two countries are a sufficient comment on thnt aspect of the business, and a little experience of French sanitary standards, coupled with the shocking records of tho French military hospitals during the war, will save us from any necessity of blushing. The French death rate is twenty-five per cent above ours, French domestic sanitation is about two centuries behind ours, and a trained nurse in France is as fare as a black swan. But in spite of all this, perhaps because of all this, Franco has a terror of smallpox and regards our laxity in regard to vaccination as a menace to herself. That laxity has sprung, not so much from disbelief in the value of vaccination, as from the security which our higher standards of sanitation has secured to us. In the last fifty years tho mortality from smallpox in these islands has shrunk almost to vanishing point. In the decade 1871-80 the deaths numbered 5742 annually; in the decade 1911-20 they had fallen to fourteen annually; in the last five years they have averaged eighteen a year. There are twice as many deaths every day of the year from influenza as there are in a whole year from smallpox, and thrice as many every day from tuberculosis. Is there any country in the world which can claim to have made so complete a conquest over the disease as this country has done? Certainly France cannot. If she could she would not, of course, have been seized with this grotesque panic. It is because her low standards of public health make her so vulnerable that she attaches so much importance to the prophylactic of vaccination. Whether tho immunity which our higher standards have given us has tended to make us think too lightly of vaccination is a subject of controversy on which I offer no opinion, but it is certain that while the disease remains so completely under control there will be no change in the public mind on the subject. People do not get vaccinated for the pleasure of being vaccinated, but to protect themselves against a real danger, and if the danger lias ceased to be real, the prophylactic will increasingly cease to be employed, except in the rare cases of specific attack."