HEART DISEASE

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 20110, 31 March 1928, Page 14 (Supplement)

HEART DISEASE

AMERICA’S FIGHT “Heart disease causes more deaths over.- year in the United States than any other factor,” declares Dr Haven Emerson, Professor of Public Health Administration in Columbia University (U.S.A.)

“It has gradually outstripped Bright’s disease, pneumonia, cancer, and even tuberculosis. It cuts in half the life span of its victims.” The steady advance of heart disease led to the fight against it being organised on a nation-wide scale, and the American Heart Association was formed three years ago. “We have not yet stemmed the onward rush of heart disease,” says Dr Emerson in a recent statement.

“That will take many years, since the concerted fight against it is so new and so many eases begin far back in childhood. Also there is so much about it that we have yet to learn. One reason for its increase is the happy fact that people are being saved from other diseases. The normal span of life has been lengthened since the Civil War by 20 years. As heart disease slays nine-tenths of its victims after they have passed the age of 40, this means that the more people we keep alive until middle age and later the more possible targets we have among us for this insidious enemy. But that is no reason for giving up the light.

“If hundreds of thousands could be saved from the scourge of tuberculosis by a campaign of research and education, why may not this new foe finally be conquered in the same way, even though it will have to be a guerilla warfare against an opponent with whose habits and vulnerable points we are m*ch less familiar, and one -which uses a great variety of weapons and modes of attack? One of the reasons why the disease has been so difficult to light is that it is in-reality nou one disease, but many, with different causes, different symptoms, and different methods of prevention and treatment. ’ ’