INFANT LIFE

Evening Post, Volume XCV, Issue 14, 16 January 1918, Page 9

INFANT LIFE

A CAMPAIGN IN ENGLAND,

.(FROM OUR OWN CORRESPONDENT.) • '. LONDON, 13th November. Lord Flunket is chairman of a Provisional Committee which has been formed in England to promote the care of infant life. Lord Rhondda stated recently that ft was one of the aims of the future Ministry of Health to effect a yearly saving of 50,000 infant lives in the United Kingdom by reducing infant mortality from the present rate of 100 per 1000 to about 50 per 1000, which is an average level: for Australasia.

In the" October number of the Engineers' Review, Dr. Eric Pritchard, who is hon. secretary of the National Associa- 1 tion for the Prevention oC Infant Mortality, has some interesting remarks on the vital statistics of New Zealand. He says: "The infant mortality in this country is now the lowest in the world. ■But, in spite of its natural advantages from climate, prosperity, sparseness of population, and milk supply, absenceflbf the industrial employment of women, and of all the usual factors which determine a high mortality rate among infants, New Zealand, had a death-fate" twelve years ago higher than that which now obtains in Hampstead and in many other London suburbs. The death-rate in New Zealand only began to assume its present favourable proportion after an active educational and propaganda campaign had been inaugurated (1907) by the Society for the Health of Women and Children. Intelligence. and a good knowledge of mothcrcraft will triumph over the disadvantages and dangers of bad housing, insanitat.ion, and oven poverty, but no awounf/ of good housing and no climate ,\\m compensate for tuatsmul ignorance