Hunger, Disease In Mississippi

Press, Volume CVII, Issue 31407, 28 June 1967, Page 6

Hunger, Disease In Mississippi

(IV.Z. Press Association— Copyright)

ATLANTA, June 27.

Thousands of Negro children in Mississippi are victims of hunger and disease, living in “shocking” conditions, a team of doctors has reported.

The doctors toured a sixcounty area of Mississippi last May.

“We saw children whose nutritional and medical condition we can only describe as shocking—even to a group of

physicians whose work involves daily confrontation with disease and suffering," they said. What they found in their tour was contained in a report entitled “Hungry Children.” An individual report was filed separately by Dr. Raymond Wheeler, of North Carolina.

The doctors visited between 600 and 700 families. One of them also spent several weeks living in a Negro community in Alabama and observing its problems.

They told Federal officials that two and three-year-old children in parts of Mississippi and Alabama were “beyond medical help.”

The doctors recommended that a survey of the entire South be conducted to determine where children are suffering from disease and starvation.

They said welfare and food programmes were in the hands of people “who use them selectively, politically and with obvious racial considerations in mind.”