LEPER COLONY

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LX, Issue 18067, 19 April 1933, Page 2

LEPER COLONY

PATIENTS AT MAKOGAI ENCOURAGING RESULTS Recent advances in the treatment of leprosy have been introduced with encouraging results into the leper hospital on the island of Makogai, Fiji. According to the medical superintendent, Dr. C. J. Austin, who arrived at Auckland by the Niagara from Suva, 250 patients have been discharged from the island since 1918. It is no longer the case, therefore, that a leper patient is necessarily doomed to “life imprisonment” oil the island. Under modern methods of treatment thero is a reasonable chance that ho or she will be cured, or, as tho doctors cautiously prefer to say, tho disease will bo arrested.

Dr. Austin, who is proceeding to England on leave, succeeded Dr. E. A. Neli as medical superintendent at the leper hospital five years ago. lie said the hospital at present accommodated 460 patients, compared with 954 in 1926, the decrease being largely accounted for by the increased number of patients discharged. Treatment, ho said, had greatly improved in recent years, and the latest advances in medical science were being successfully applied at the hospital. Patients who improved sufficiently to warrant discharge were recommended by the medical superintendent for examination by a board ol' Government medical officers, which met every six months and which could obtain the authority of the Governor of Fiji to havo the patient sent back to his homo under certain restrictions.

Tho vast majority of the leper patients on tho island are Fijians and Indians, but there are in addition approximately 40 Cook Islanders, 15 Samoans and _lO Tongans. The small white population includes two New Zealanders. On the whole, Europeans and aboriginals appear to be least affected by the disease, which attacks in most virulent form peoples living in a semi-civilised state.