DOCTOR "APPALLED"

Auckland Star, Volume LXXV, Issue 153, 30 June 1944, Page 3

DOCTOR "APPALLED"

YOUNG PEOPLES TEETH

"As a medical officer examining for one of the State Departments. I am appalled at the condition of our young people's teeth," said Dr. H. M. Wilson in an address to a meeting of the Plunket Society and kindred organisations in Hastings. "Last year I met a Samoan on a train journey. I just sat back and looked at his beautiful teeth, all there, no disease, and such a wonderful colour. We talked of our diets. On that small island the babies are brought up on the breast, and at an early age are given a small boiled banana, and then with their fish, their vegetables, their fruit and their coconuts they carry on with a good mixed diet. "Gunther, in his Latin-America, talks of the Mexicans and their wonderful teeth. There, when the flour is being milled, they throw in powdered lime. What is the matter here? "The Maori had beautiful teeth; now they are bad. The Americans have wonderful teeth. Here it is proved that it is not a matter of soil, as the .Maoris' teeth were so good, but it is a question of diet. "Is it not time that a thoroughly qualified scientific committee was set up to unravel the question of bad teeth? Let us pay men and women good salaries and let the scientist tell us what to do. If successful, as I am sure they would be, what an investment it would be. To-day, we have dental clinics and we end up with no teeth. The treatment is preventive."

USES FOR DRUGS

A TYPHUS REPELLENT NEW YORK. For scores of years chemists struggled to build up complex synthetic compounds for which no use was known or expected—with the exception of striking a gold mine in the form of a new dye—and many tens of thousands of such compounds have been recorded. Chemists are now discovering use for these substances. Niacin (Vitamin C) was such a compound. So was the original sulfa drug. One made 70 years ago by a German chemist and interred in the archives under the name dichloro-diphenvl-tri-chlorotehane was discovered by a Swiss firm to be useful for repelling moths and plant lice. The United States Department of Agriculture chemists discovered it was much more effective against body lice, which are the agents spreading typhus. A single dusting of the clothes gives protection for a month. The Grasselli Chemical Department of the du Pont Company recently sent the first 5001b overseas by aeroplane, and is now rushing work on a plant for mass production.