g and educational agencies, both city
and State; obtaining information concerning the cause and prevention of
diseases, and disseminating scientifically proved information on all health
subjects.
It is maintained that the movement for the conservation of health is the
most momentous of the conservation movements in this country, and that of
all the national wastes which are to be condemned, this waste of health is
the gravest.
Many startling statements are set forth in the document. Dr. Charles
Wardell Stiles, of the United States Public Health and Marine Hospital
Services, declares that "The United States is seven times dirtier than
Germany and ten times as unclean as Switzerland." He declares that: "Lack
of interest in preventive measures against diseases is slaughtering the
human race." He takes the position that the real trouble is not so much
race suicide as race slaughter, and that it is rather that too many
children are allowed to die than that not enough children are born.
It is estimated that tuberculosis, a preventable disease, costs the nations
$1,000,000,000 annually. Typhoid fever is estimated by Dr. George M. Kober,
dean of the medical department of Georgetown University, to cost over
$300,000,000 annually. [Page 50]
In connection with acute diseases this statement is made: "The loss from
tuberculosis has been reduced to half of what it was thirty years ago.
Nevertheless, of the 90,000,000 people now living in the United States at
least 5,000,000 will be lost through this disease because adequate effort
is not made to prevent it. Besides the economic waste through deaths from
any disease, the waste through sickness from the same disease is also
colossal."
Great as are the reductions in the rates of infant mortality by improved
milk and water supplies and by educational campaigns, the present rate is
still enormous.
"If some witch or wizard could conjure up the unnecessary babies' funerals
annually occurring in this country it would be found that the little
hearses would reach from New York to Chicago. If we should add the mourning
mothers and friends, it would make a cortege extending across the
continent."
While the death rates from acute diseases have been greatly reduced, the
rates from chronic diseases have been steadily increasing. Cancer is one of
the chronic diseases apparently on the increase.
That the annual death toll and the 3,000,000 constant sick beds could be
reduced from on
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