DISEASE IN RUSSIA.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19069, 15 January 1924, Page 8

DISEASE IN RUSSIA.

SOME APPALLING .FIGURES. The wave of epidemics which has been sweeping over Russia for the last four years (says the Russian correspondent of a London paper) was the subject of a long speech made by the Soviet Commissary of Health, Semashko, at the last session of the All-Russian Soviet Executive, held in Moscow. According to Soviet statistics, during the first seven qr eight months of 1922 over 2.500.000 cases of typhus were reported in the Russian Soviet Republic, and over 42,000 cases of smallpox. Both these epidemics have, however, abated in the course of <.the corresponding period in 1923, when about 700.000 eases of typhus and 54,000 cases of smallpox were notified by the Soviet medical authorities. The comparatively new epidemic of malaria, which, since 1922, has spread from Turkestan and the Eastern provinces all over Russia, and which is at present raging in the whole of Central and Northern Russia (including Moscow), where malaria until the Bolshevist regime was a totally unknown malady, has reached such alarming proportions that Semashko was forced to confess the complete inability of the Soviet medical authorities to cope with it. In 1922 a total of 2.086,417 cases of malaria were registered in Russia, while in the first seven months of the present year this figure has vastly increased. In Moscow alone nearly 14,000 cases have been registered, most of which have been fatal.