TACKLING T.B. THE WRONG WAY.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 18467, 19 May 1928, Page 6

TACKLING T.B. THE WRONG WAY.

DR BLACKMORE AGAIN CRITICISES HEAD OF HEALTH DEPARTMENT. Commenting on the committee appointed to investigate aspects of consumption treatment in the Dominion, Dr G. J. Blackmore, Director of Tuberculosis Institutions in North Canterbury, to-day again criticised Dr T. H. Valintine, Director-General of .Public Health. Dr Blackmore said:— “ As to the members of the committee, Dr F. W. B. Fitchett is not Professor- of Medicine at, Otago University, but Professor of Clinical Medicine, a somewhat different thing. He is in practice in Dunedin. lam told that Dr D. E. Fenwick, “Wellington, is a nerve specialist, but I do not know him personally. Dr T. W. J. Johnson, Auckland, I know nothing of. Dr Fitchett is well-known in Dunedin, and is quite a good man, I think. “ When I spoke to members of Parliament last week, I said that the Health Department was appointing a Commission to try to discredit the work that had been done, and was being done, in the South Island, and that the Commission meant that specialists in the South Island being put on their trial by the Department. I know that it was said that I was mistaken; but I was speaking with a little inside knowledge as to the causes that brought about this Commission. You notice by what the Minister for Health, has said that the Commission is to find out whether consumptives are being properly diagnosed, whether they are being properly treated, and whether they are being kept under treatment too long. “ I think it will be found a little difficult now to contradict statements I made to the members of Parliament as to the real objects of the Commission. “ For some time, the Director-General of Health has been trying to interfere with the treatment of patients here and at Waitiata. Not long ago, he went privately to members of the Hospital Board here—that means not to the board in open meeting—and said that I was keeping patients too long under treatment, and that if I did not do so there would be ample accommodation for the consumptives who wished to come in. That was the reason for the remarks I made in my annual report last month as to the remarkable proposition put forward to send out cases that had been taken into the Coronhtion Hospital from their very unsuitable surroundings and let them return to their homes, to infect other people, in order to take in similar cases from similar homes, and then later treat them in the same way. ’The Director-General has made t the same remarks about the length of treatment to the Waitiata Sanatorium Committee. But he did more than that at Waitiata. He,went to the sana-' torium in the absence of the medical superintendent only a few weeks ago. called for the patients’ clinical records, and then examined several patients himself, and gave his opinion as to their condition. “ Note that there is now no talk of the Commission formulating a policy to deal with tuberculosis in New Zealand, or even to try to find out new facts about the disease. If the experts are not to be the ones to decide about the diagnosis and treatment of consurnptives, who then is to decide? Is the Health Department to put forward a scheme for diagnosing and treating consumptives that is to be followed by men who have had special training in this work, and have for years been demoting their whole time to dealing with tuberculosis? “ The Commission is supposed to make an impartial and independent investigation * into the tuberculosis problems. Yet I see that this Commission is to be accompanied by the Director-General and his deputy, •presumably for the purpose Of that the Commission recommends what the Director-General thinks it should recommend.”