Health Stamps

Press, Volume LXXXV, Issue 25924, 3 October 1949, Page 6

Health Stamps

The annual health stamps campaign. which opens to-day, needs only the briefest recommendation now but deserves the strongest and warmest possible. The health camps, administered and financed jointly by the King George V Memorial Fund Board and the New Zealand Federation of Health Camps, have proved themselves thoroughly, as much in discovering the extent of the remedial and educational need they meet as in meeting it with a success almost impossible to praise too much. Nobody should shrink from the fact that the community is reproached by the evidence that the health camps movement lias brought into the open: that thousands of children have such physical defects, or are in such a state of malnutrition as the regimen and treatment of the camps arc admirably designed to remedy. If there were no camps, most or many of these children would for one reason or another go without this special and timely care; they would be headed towards a worse physical condition, a lower state of health, much more difficult to correct and sometimes permanent. But the evidence has been brought into the open —by the health camps; the special and timely care is being given—by the health camps; as many as 3000 children a year are now given what is in effect a new chance in life—by the health camps; and thousands more, especially parents, are moved and helped to hold it fast for them —by the health camps. It is well that such work as this, though it has the active support of the Department of Health, should be maintained and extended, as indeed there is need to extend it, by voluntary service and by voluntary financial help. Half its value lies in its being done by communities whose imagination is wakened and whose thinking is turned to the purpose by a sense of personal responsibility for it. The established method of calling on the community to co-operate, by buying health stamps, would not be so brilliantly successful as it has come to be without the admirable example of co-operation given by the Post and Telegraph Department’s staff and by many unofficial volunteers. Their annual effort, carefully prepared, begins to-day—an effort to make everybody a partner in a great work; and everybody should be glad to be.