SWEPT BY DISEASE

Southland Times, Issue 19518, 18 May 1922, Page 7

SWEPT BY DISEASE

VOLGA VALLEY FAMINE. The League of Nations has issued a ‘‘Report on the health situation in Eastern Europe in Januaiy, 1922.” Its investigations cover Soviet Russia and Eastern Poland. The most prevalent diseases in these districts are cholera, typhoid fever, typhus and relapsing fever. The last is a kind of recurrent which afflicts its victims over and over again and leaves them increasingly weak. In every case a great increase of these epidemics is reported. Mainly this is attributable to the famine in the Volga Valley and the exodus of refugees from that area. Cholera, for instance, which had raged all the early part of last summer, ended abruptly in August. Now it has broken out in many places throughout the Ukraine. This' is an immensely fertile district, and tens of thousands of starving people lied to it in September in the hope of finding food. The twofold result was the partial exhaustion of supplies in the Ukraine and a bad outbreak of cholera. Now there is grave danger that the native population of the Ukraine may be compelled to begin a westward movement in search of food and to escape from epidemics. As regards typhus, 20 million cases occurred in the years 1919 and 1920 in Soviet Russia and Soviet Ukraine. In Soviet Russia alone between six and seven million cases were notified in 1921. It is now very considerably increasing, more especially in districts visited by refugees. “It is clear,” says the League of Nations Report, “that at the beginning of 1922 the epidemic situation in Eastern Europe presents a very real and immediate danger. Last year the sanitary cordon organised by the Polish Public Health Service, with the assistance of the Epidemc Commission of the League of Nations, was completed on the northern and central parts of the frontier, and the disorganisation caused by the Russo-Polish war in the south was being repaired. The epidemks in Russia then seemed to be diminishing, and in Poland a very considerable improvement had taken place. The refugees arriving in the eastern provinces of Poland were being gradually absorbed by the local population. This year the famine set in motion hundreds of thousands of Russians, and the result has been a sudden increase of all the epidemics. It has compelled the non-Russian re-emigrants to try to reach home in increasing numbers, with the double result of a break in the sanitary defences of the Polish Health Administration and a very grave extension of epidemics in Poland itself. At the same time the problem of the settlement of the re-emigrants on their devastated lands has become almost insoluble.” Unhappily there is at present no prospect of better conditions. The famine is expected to reach its height in April, and there are grave fears that the spread of epidemics will be seriously aggravated at that time.