HEALTH OF NATIVES

Evening Star, Issue 22308, 7 April 1936, Page 11

HEALTH OF NATIVES

SOUTH AFRICAN PROBLEM The view that the native reserves in South Africa will become an “ inexhaustible reservoir of disease, compared with which the black belts of the towns are nothing,” if the public health policy of the Union is to leave them alone and wait until the disease conditions demand attention, was expressed by I>r G. A. Park Ross at the Health Congress held in Cape Town recently. It was generally held, Dr Ross continued, that the native, from a health point of view, was changing for the worse. Nothing that they could do would prevent him from adoping European clothing and from living in a European type of house when he got on a bit in the world. What was not generally recognised was that he was as ripe to absorb European ideas about health control. Dr Ross described the attempts to ■minimise the incidence of malaria in Natal and Zululand, a potential reservoir of fever which would provide an endless menace to the rest of the country. At the beginning they were opposed by every obstacle which superstition, prejudice, witchcraft, apathy, and active opposition could muster. They had broken that down, and the work of prevention was now carried out largely by natives themselves and partly paid for by them. Their malaria work had proved that the approach to the black man was by black man supervised by the white, and also that the main attack must be education and that it must be made from kraal to kraal. The people must be tackled in their homes by visiting and by demonstration. .