THE TREATMENT OF CONSUMPTION.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19124, 19 March 1924, Page 6

THE TREATMENT OF CONSUMPTION.

The Minister of Health dealt quite adroitly yesterday with the deputation representing the Otago Hospital Board which directed his attention to the administrative anomalies that exist in the treatment of consumption in New Zealand. Yet fie merely succeeded in evading the real issue. No two opinions are possible as to the national menace which the prevalence of consumption presents; and it is of the greatest importance that the treatment should be systematised and organised in accordance with the results of the most modern research. Successive Governments have, however, evinced a disinclination to shoulder what after all are their proper responsibilities in this respect. A gleam of a recognition of them has certainly been furnished in the North Island where the Department of Health has been forced to accept the control of two sanatoria. The deputation yesterday suggested that the policy which has been entered upon in the North Island should be extended to the South by placing the sanatoria at present managed by the Hospital Boards under direct Government control. When Dr Newlands, having regard to the causation of a great deal of consumption, claimed that there should be a co-ordination of activity between the Departments of Health and Agriculture he added a strong argument to that in favour of the treatment of consumption as a matter of national concern. The Hospital Boards of the South Island have no grievance, as was suggested by Sir Maui Pomare, against the North Island boards. What is asked is that they shall be relieved of a responsibility which the boards in the North Island decline to accept. And Sir Maui Pomare offered a feeble objection to this request when he asked why the Government should not control the general hospitals if it were to control the sanatoria. The rejoinder to which he exposed himself is obvious. Why should the Government control the mental hospitals if it does not control the general hospitals ? The answer is found both in the prevalence of mental disease and in the peculiar difficulties with which the treatment of it is surrounded, and tho need for the existence of special institutions for the treatment of consumption places this disease to that extent on the same basis as mental disease.