LEPER COLONY

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XXIII, Issue 107, 19 April 1933, Page 3

LEPER COLONY

PATIENTS AT MAKOGAI ENCOURAGING RESULTS. ADVANCED METHODS USED. Auckland, April 18. Recent advances in the treatment of leprosy have been introduced with encouraging results into the leper hospital on the island of Makogai, Fiji. According to the medical superintendent, Dr. C. J. Austin, who arrived by the Niagara from Suva yesterday, 250 patients have been discharged from the island since 1918. It is no longer the case, therefore, that a leper patient is necessarily doomed to ‘‘life imprisonment’’ on the island. Under modern methods of treatment theie is a reasonable chance that he or she will be cured, or, as tho doctors cautiously prefer to say, the disease will be arrested. Dr. Austin, who is proceeding to England on leave, succeeded Dr. E. A. Neff as medical superintendent at the leper hospital five years ago. He said the hospital at present accommodated 460 patients, compared with 954 in 1926, the decrease being largely accounted for by the increased number of patients discharged. Treatment, he said, had greatly improved in recent years and tho latest advances m medical science were being successfully applied at the hospital. Patients who improved sufficiently to warrant discharge were recommended by the medical superintendent for examination by a board of Government medical officers, which met every six months and which could obtain the authority of the Governor of Fiji to have the patient sent back to his home under certain restrictions. The vast majority of the leper patients on the island are Fijians and Indians but there are in addition approximately 40 Cook Islanders, 15 Samoans and 10 Tongans. The small white population includes two New Zealanders. On the whole, Europeans and aboriginals appear to be least affected by the disease, which attacks in most virulent form people living in a semicivilised state. Dr. xYustin said the patients and the hospital authorities were greatly indebted to the people of New Zealand for many comforts and luxuries which were sent from Auckland every Christmas. One of the New Zealand gifts was a cmenia machine, which was supplied regularly by the Paramount Corporation with suitable films, while the dynamos for the supply of electric power, another New Zealand gift, furnished the hospital with electric light. These gifts were highly appreciated, said Dr. Austin; they provided the patients with some of the comforts and relaxations enjoyed by the civilised world and were a powerful means of maintaining morale among an unfortunate colony which ordinarily might be inclined to give way to despair.