SCOURGE OF EPILEPSY

Otago Daily Times, Issue 27277, 31 December 1949, Page 6

SCOURGE OF EPILEPSY

Campaign Against Disease

WORLD DRIVE PLANNED A world campaign is being planned to help over 10,000,000 people, or more than one in every 200 of the world’s population, suffering from epilepsy. With the tension of modern life increasing the number of epileptics by 500,000 a year, medical authorities are planning a new drive against the disease. The International League to combat epilepsy is being drastically re-organised, its scope widened, and its methods modernised. The head of its new Secretariat-general -is Dr Ledeboer, director of the Netherlands Epilepsy Institute, and a recognised world authority on the disease. His appointment is regarded in medical circles as a world-wide tribute both to him personally and also to Holland where the battle against epilepsy is regarded as “ the best organised in the world.”

Dr Ledeboer has had wide experience in tackling this disease in his own country where there are at least 60,000 known sufferers. His research work has also shown that in most European countries about one person in every 10 has a tendency towards the disease, even if they do not show any outward symptoms. That means that Holland is faced with a possible increase of 1,000,000 in its epileptic patients, but there is so little general interest in the effects of the disease and so much ignorance of its dangers, •that up to the present most countries have failed to pay as much attention to combatting it as they have to the more widely-feared diseases such as cancer and tuberculosis. The general attitude has been that epilepsy is more or less hereditary and therefore incurable.— Reuter, Haarlem, (Holland)-.