HYGIENE SECTION

Evening Post, Volume CXXXV, Issue 2, 4 January 1943, Page 4

HYGIENE SECTION

GOOD WORK IN THE DESERT (Official War Correspondent, N.Z.E.F.) NOFILIA, Tripolitania, Dec. 27. With the advance of our forces through country formerly occupied by Axis troops and none too hygienic Italian colonists, the work of the small section of New Zealanders who specialise in the prevention of disease has become increasingly important. By checking sources of diseases —unclean prisoners, faulty water points, and cleanliness of our troops and their camp sites in Tripolitania—these men are working to prevent outbreak of dysentery and other diseases which are known to have caused heavy casualties among the Germans and Italians. Though water has been scarce all through the New Zealanders' months of continuous desert service, the low disease-rate among our men shows the successful thoroughness of the hygiene section's work. I The newest equipment being used by the section is a captured mobile plant of 14 showers left by the Italians in their evacuation of Tobruk. First tested by New Zealanders at Bardia, where it provided hot showers for 7000 men, the plant has been carried on top of one water wagon during our advance across Libya and now gives showers every day to about 1000 men from encampments along the Gulf of Sirte. The entire equipment, which is operated by j two men, fits into three small cases and J can be erected ready for use within an hour. It does not require a water point, and can be operated with a wastage of only a pint of water for each man. Other hygiene section men, most of I whom were health and sanitary inspectors, in New Zealand, have been inoculated with new anti-typhus vaccine for their work with prisoners. During this advance yet another part of the New Zealand section has operated with our forward engineers testing water drawn from wells along the coast..