LEPERS AT DARWIN

Evening Post, Volume CXIII, Issue 126, 1 June 1927, Page 9

LEPERS AT DARWIN

R6PLY TO COMPLAINTS

BAD TREATMENT DENIED

(United Press Association.—Copyright.)

(Beceived Ist June, noon.)

MELBOUBNE; Thin Day. y Referring to complaints about the leper station at Darwin, the Minister .for Home and Territories (Mr. Marr) said tKat ,it.was quite untrue that Itpers were left imcared for and not f«d or clothed. He had been advised that the Chief' Medical Officer of the Health Department had visited the Lazaret, every, week for the inspection and treatment of lepers. During the time between the visits treatment was carried out under the supervision of an intelligent half-caste inmate. A weekly ration was supplied to the inmates, and clothes and other articles were supplied when requested. The recent escape of some lepers was not due to maltreatment, but to quarrelling and jealousy among the lepers themselves. Mr: Marr admitted that the site was an unsuitable • one for a leper station, and said that the Government had been, endeavouring for some time to procure * better one. ' . , (From "The Post's" Representative;) .'.[■■'■■ ■■.:.-.' SYDNEY, 27th May. Of the flood of public addresses that appear daily in the papers of this city, lew hold the public interest. Sydney J» copying the American habit of eating"* its meals in clubs and similar institutions with 'addresses on subjects of .public interest as a savoury. The übiquitous pressman always seems to bo invited to these functions, and tho result is that the addresses are given >: to'-a., greater public, than that . which champs its jaws as the'words are u'ttoreu. Few ■of these addresses have stirred the public as one delivered this week to a gathering of luncheon-takers at the Millions Club. The speaker was the Eev. W. Eddy, secretary in Australia, and New Zealand for the Mission to Lepers^ an institution which cares for 20,000 lepers in various non-Christian countries. Australians were startled to learn that a pitiful state of affairs exists' in their own Northern Territory, where, according to Mr. Eddy,- nothing is done to help the miserable victims of the disease. "Conditions there," said Mr. Eddy, "call urgently for attention. About 12 mea and women are'segregated at Darwin on a mud island away from all comfort and all aid. No one comes to dress their wounds. No one feeds them,, or clothes them. Becently, in the extremity of their suffering and despair, nine of them escaped to the mainland, swimming through water infested with sharks and crocodiles. One, I understand, died in tho bush, four were recaptured'2oo miles from the-place whence they escaped, but the other* are probably still wandering, a terrible menace to all the people about them." .' - Mr. Kddy said that She disease had no' terrible hold on Australia, as there were «fljr 15 lepers in New South Wales, T± in Queensland, and Western Australia 13, besides those in the Northern Territory. Compared with this. India haS 350,000, China 500,000, and in all parts of the world, 12,000.000. The Mission to Lepers was fighting a great battle for Australia and New Zealand, because through the East whose teeming_ populations hung npon Australia's horizon this unspeakably repulsive disease rioted and devastated. Thence, in fact, it was introduced to Australia by cheap labour imported to the mines and sugar fields. ' The situation which faced a man new-ly-infected with leprosy, said Mr. Eddy, was by no meons desperate in these days.., New treatments enabled the hospitals to arrest the disease in 70. per cent, of the victims and to. cure 25 per cent. .During the l£st two years 14 patients had been discharged from the Queensland segregation station.