DISEASE IE CHINA

Manawatu Standard, Volume LVIII, Issue 9, 8 December 1937, Page 6

DISEASE IE CHINA

WHAT THE-LEAGUE IS DOING. (By Ronald Wolfrey.) One bright spot in the Far Eastern situation is the ready assistance which the League of Nations is providing to China in a struggle that is second in importance only to the conflict in the field. Disease, always the camp-fol-lower of Mars, has started to stalk through the broad provinces of China. There have been outbreaks of cholera reported from important centres of population such as Hong Kong, but all too little publicity has been given to the ravages of disease in the more distant parts. The war zones are naturally liable to epidemics, for overcrowding and fatigue among the soldiers render them highly vulnerable to infection. Another source of danger is to be found in the streams of refugees fleeing to safety from the northern to the central and southern areas of the country. Unwittingly they may carry disease to regions which had been freed from the scourge of bubonic plague, smallpox, or cholera.

It is to meet this menace that the Health Organisation of the League of Nations has speedily aranged to send mobile hospital units to the five Chinese provinces where they are most needed. These arrangements could not have been made so rapidly but for the expert knowledge which the League already possesses of public health conditions in China. For many years past, Geneva has been co-operat-ing with Nanking to give that vast country an up-to-date public health service. Ever since , the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, vast improvements in the conditions have been achieved. i

A feature of the present conflict has been the unity revealed among the previously conflicting elements in China. Marshal Chiang Kai-shek took advantage of the anti-Japanese feeling •provoked by the earlier attack to press ahead with his ambitious schemes of reconstruction. When League doctors first went out to China to study conditions on the spot, they had to be transported to the less accessible areas in- wheelbarrows. In the past five years China has built more roads than in the previous three thousand years of her history. With the co-operation of the Chinese' health authorities, long-range plans have been made for rescuing the country from its superstitious belief in such remedies as gilded pills containing powdered tiger-claws. Propaganda has been adapted to the Chinese mentality. The “New Life” campaign, for example, has been busily teaching people to “swat that fly” and “xterminaje that rat.” As* a nucleus for a modern hospital system, and as the headquarters of co-operation between the League Health Organisation and the Chinese Health Service, a Central Field Hospital and a National Field Health Station were set up at Nanking. News has been received that these hospitals have been reduced to ruins by bombs from Japanese aircraft.