PREVALENCE OE GOITRE

Southland Times, Issue 19509, 8 May 1922, Page 6

PREVALENCE OE GOITRE

ATTRIBUTED TO IMPROPER DIET DR. THACKER INTERVIEWED (Special to the Times.) CHRISTCHURCH, May 6. The prevalence of goitre in Christchurch was the subject of an interview with Dr. Thacker, M.P., regarding some of the known facts relative to the disease, and the methods that ought to be taken to combat it. In the main Dr. Thacker indicated that proper dieting on fresh food was one of the important factors in the “The whole hearted cure of the goitre trouble must be by determining the exact causes and putting the whole of the peopk of New Zealand on to a proper diet of fresh food grown on soils that have the necessary chemical constituents and by attending to housing, lighting, cooking, sanitation, and the rational enjoyment oi the people. In the recent break-up of schools and at presentations to departing headmasters I observed, owing to the fashion of lownecked dresses on the girls, that practically one in every ten, perhaps more than that, had commencing or developed goitre. Operations and medical treatments will not eradicate this disease, and most probably the Almighty Evolutionist has evolved goitre with the very ugly sympton of r.n enlarged gland in the throat which otherwise in man and woman should be a thing of beauty, to direct man’s attention back to a proper diet. Finally, goitre cannot be caused by water, because only a certain number oi individuals in a community have it. If water caused it and there was a common water supply, everybody ought to have it. If in a iamiiy of Six or eight two of the children have goitre it is personal to them, and there is something wrong in their regime of life.”