BRITAIN’S HEALTH.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LIV, Issue 252, 21 September 1934, Page 6

BRITAIN’S HEALTH.

Erom time to time the most extreme political critics of Britain’s social legislation, or alleged lack of it, have asserted that the depressed economic conditions through which the country has been passing have resulted in a vast amount of undernourishment and sickness among the workless and those depending on charitable aid. Indeed, the Governments of the day have been accused of allowing - national deterioration of health to take place unchecked. Statements such as these receive their answer in the statistics compiled by the Ministry of Health, which has an elaborate organisation covering the whole of the country and which annually surveys the general trend of the health of the people as well as analyses data respecting individual diseases, housing conditions, social services, industrial diseases, and the like. Even during the most acute stages of the depression, that is to say the four years up to 1933, the reports of the. Ministry have shown that in spite of the backward economic conditions the national health on the whole has not suffered. Certainly attention has been directed—as in the years before the blight settled on industry—to the need for widely organised schemes of better housing, and it is to the credit of the Government and local authorities that they have recognised this and taken immense measures to deal with it. This phase lies apart from the incidence of the depression and its effect on the general health of the people. Now there lias been published the report of the Chief Medical Officer (Sir George Newman) of the Ministry of Health, an arresting paper, which says that, despite social and economic difficulties, the nutrition of the English people (the report covers England and Wales and presumably the reference applies to both) unquestionably was better in 1933 than at any period of which there is a record. There is, he adds, no evidence of national deterioration —and the general death rate has been declining for a generation. Statistics, though usually dry matter to the average individual, have their value in many respects, including that oi refuting wild statements about the condition of the poor in a country in which social legislation has made tremendous strides in the present century.