MILK FOR SCHOOL CHILDREN

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22609, 28 June 1935, Page 14

MILK FOR SCHOOL CHILDREN

TO THIS EDITOR Sir, —The time has arrived when all school children in New Zealand should receive a ration of milk daily. It is rather a shocking state of affairs that, in a country which has been called Britain's dairy farm nearly 75 per tent, of our school children are suffering from some physical delect, due in many cases to malnutrition. This, in a few years, means full hospitals and a large national wastage through illness. A lloyal Commission has recommended a milk ration as being desirable, and the plan has been endorsed by several of the loading doctors in New Zealand, who have become alarmed at the large amount of preventable disease among children in the larger towns. Our late GovernorGeneral, Lord Bledisloc, asked in the course of a speech in Christchurch:— " Why, with your excellent climate, are your hospitals so full? In New Zealand," he said, "you have a very low milk consumption by children, and this might be one of the reasons why New Zealand children are suffering from malnutrition, with abnormalities throughout life. Would it not be true humanitarianism as well as a good financial investment to see that the young people had a sufficiency of milk, even at the public expense?"

Wc advise the people of the Old Country to drink more milk so that we can send more of our butter to them, when we should apply the same advice to ourselves. What, then, prevents our legislators from bringing in this measure? The only possible reasons are financial ones, for the scheme could be worked through town and county councils without adding to the army of civil servants in Wellington. It is evidently sounder finance to allow a large number of Xew Zealanders to grow up into C 3 citizens than to pay now for some extra milk. W'lien we read of the appalling social conditions obtaining in Britain less than 100 years ago we wonder why the people of those days allowed such things to be. Just in the same way will our children wonder at the blindness and complaisance of their father 6 to much that could be improved in our social conditions to-day. —I am, etc., Latex.