Venereal Disease.

Press, Volume LIX, Issue 17812, 11 July 1923, Page 8

Venereal Disease.

"We direct, attention to a letter in another column written by the Hon. W. H. Triggs. Mr Triggs takes exception t-o our opinion, expressed two or three days ago in a- notice of the second issue of the V.l>. Report, that it will be " impossible for Parliament to pass a "useful Bill this session." We need not say that we shall bo very thankful indeed if wo are proved to be wrong. When wo consider on the on© hand Mr Massey'9 overloaded programme and definite time limit, and on the other the extreme difficulty and delicacy of the task of embodying the recommendations of the V.D. Committee in a Bill at once' coercive and restrained, we are not hopeful that adequate measures can be taken within the next two months. But if the Committee have grounds for supposing that Parliament could and] would (with a little pressure) do something useful this session, that is distinctly encouraging. W© are impressed particularly by the statement of Mr Triggs that letters are still reaching him approving of the Iteport, and expressing a hope that the Government will bring down a Bill this session embodying its chief recommendations. It is very difficult to know just what degree of public interest the problem! still excites, and although our own impression lias been of apathy rather than of interest—both within the House and outside —the members of the Committee ought to know better than anyone el Be precisely what the facto are. In any case there can he no escape from the solemn warnings of Mr Trigga as to the gravity of the problem. Most of the diseaaes about which the community excites itself seem comparatively harmless when measured against the two t commonest forms of V.D I . There is no other highly infectious scourge in. tho country the known victims of which number over 3000, and the unknown (but undoubted) sufferers at least 3000 more, and if there were, and the law just let things talke their course, the indignation that would 1 be arousedi would be uncontrollable. Yet venereal disease has the further dreadful menace that the temptation to conduct which will sprend< it is the oldest, thfl strongest, the most constant and universal to which, mankind are Subject. When the Report first appeared (October, 1922) we expressed the belief that " the efforts now being made to fight "the disease in the open will gradually create a very strong publio "opinion concerning it, and result in " creating in the mind of the indi- " vidual man and woman, young and "old, an attitude towards it like the " attitude of the individual mind to- " wards plague, typhus, or cholera." But the difficulty is, of course, the interval during which that opinion is being formed. Mr Trigga ia right in believing that legislation cannot wait until society is in so much less need' of coercion than it is to-day. If he is right also in believing not only that a Bill would go through "with little or " no opposition," but that little or no opposition or criticism would! be neoes*sary—that it would, in brief, be a good and safe Bill —then certainly the responsibility for further delay' is a big one. And even though adequate and definitive legislation may not be possible before the end of August, Parliament might do something to prepare the way for such legislation at a later date, and to impress on the people in the meantime that further measures must and shall follow.