Family Planning Wanted For Papua-New Guinea

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32382, 22 August 1970, Page 16

Family Planning Wanted For Papua-New Guinea

(N.Z Press Assn.—Copyright) PORT MORESBY, August 20. The population explosion was the world’s “most serious epidemic,” and family planning clinics must be widely established in PapuaNew Guinea, Dr W. T. Gibbs said yesterday. Otherwise Australia would be hard pressed to provide the territory with health, education, transport, power and other facilities it needed, he said.

Dr Gibbs, of the Australian Pharmaceutical Manufacturers’ Association was speaking ait the Australian and New

Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science congress yesterday. He said that the territory’s native population increased by 60 per cent in the last 18 years, and with improved health an even more rapid explosion could be expected. When Australia moved out it would take the indigenous people an impossible task unless it had laid an adequate framework of family-planning facilities. The elimination of child marriages would be a particular help. Dr Gibbs also appealed for “rational, full and balanced” consideration of the effects of the insecticide, D.D.T. He said that proof of its dire effects would be required before they outweighed its advantage to mankind.

D.D.T. was responsible for dramatic achievements in malaria eradication.

“In no way must we allow weapons against diseases to become in any way a threat to our well being,” he said. “But we must expect to pay some price for boons which have been conferred.” Dr Gibbs said that it was regrettable that some insect . predators were lost because of D.D.T., but this was “of no account at all when the benefits of the substance are considered.

“Decisions in these matters must be made rationally after full and balanced consideration of the facts. “Emotional appeals by uninformed and imperfectlyinformed laity are completely unhelpful,” he said.