INCREASINGLY EVIDENT

Stratford Evening Post, Volume II, Issue 238, 9 May 1933, Page 2

INCREASINGLY EVIDENT

Physical and Social Deterioration EFFECT OF "DEPRESSION Press Association.—Copyright. ! London, April 18. Following upon three years' depres- : sion, signs of physical and social deterioration are becoming increasingly evident throughout the world, especially among children and mothers, declares the Manchester Guardian. Exhaustive inquiry by the "Save the Children International Union" reveals that the children of the unemployed display rapid fatigue nfter mental or bodily effort, and even inability to make any effort, as well as lowered resistance to infectious disease, protracted convalescence and an increase in rickets, tuber-, culosis, dental caries and pellagra. i The report gives sickening details of! the conditions in Germany, where boys of 10 are obliged to wear girls' tattered underclothing. They are extraordinarily I voracious and often beg bread at school us they have none al home. j The German authorities state that ' + he children are not stunted, as in wax I time, but their faces are pale and swol- | len. Absences from school are frequent owing to under-nourishment, and children are slack and listless in the class- ! rooms.

British health officers declare that the chief sufferers are "toddlers," who are often grossly deformed. The malnutrition of mothers frequently results in pre-natal dis-asc and rickets is increasing among breast-fed babies. The mothers deny themselves in order to enable their husbands and elder children to be better fed. The standard of nutrition of many of the unemployed is little better than in war time and mortality is increasing in some districts. The Guardian emphasises that the terrible cost of war depression in sanity and health is revealed in the hysteria of the Nazis, whose excesses are partly due to long privation.