"Safeguard Baby"

Mrs. Virginia D. Virgin has charge of the campaign to suppress venereal diseases in West Virginia. Dr. Edith MacBride-Dexter has similar charge in Pennsylvania. In Illinois the executive is Dr. John McShane. Eighteen months ago these jobs were obscure ones. Then, with an article in Reader's Digest, Surgeon General Thomas Parran of the U. S. Public Health Service opened a campaign to cure the 6,500,000 syphilitics in the U. S., prevent a new crop of 500,000 cases developing each year. First he was obliged to destroy national taboo against discussing venereal disease publicly.

On "National Social Hygiene Day" last week, radiorators, notably General John Joseph Pershing, Dr. Parran and President Ray Lyman Wilbur (M.D.) of Stanford University discussed such matters over 350 broadcasting stations. Dr. William Freeman Snow, director of the American Social Hygiene Association announced that, of the $500,000 which he needs to propagandize for Dr. Parran's program, he already had collected $102,000. Senator Robert Marion La Follette of Wisconsin and Representative Alfred Lee Bulwinkle of North Carolina urged Congress to appropriate $271,000,000 towards a 13-year campaign for prevention, treatment, control of venereal disease.

For their efforts to date Dr. Parran and Dr. Snow have the following results to show:

P: New laws requiring both applicants for a marriage license to show medical certificates that they are free from syphilis have gone into effect in Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin. A similar New Hampshire law is going into effect this year. (Connecticut has had such a law since 1935; New York, New Jersey, Kentucky and Oregon Legislatures have similar bills under consideration.)

P: General Convention (parliamentary body) of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the U. S. urged communicants to lobby for laws requiring premarital examinations.

P: The organization of an American Academy of Dermatology & Syphilology. P: The Intercollegiate Newspaper Association, convening at Bethlehem, Pa., undertook to spread the propaganda to all U. S. students. Delegates to the American Student Health Association convention in Chicago last week learned that every student in 144 U. S. colleges is to get a blood test. University of Minnesota has been doing this for a decade, has discovered only 23 men and 16 women syphilitics among 19,000 students.)

P: Harvard's School of Public Health organized a post-graduate course on venereal disease control for health officers and private practitioners. New York University next week begins a similar postgraduate course.

P: Billboard posters (2,000) went up all over the country, showing a happy couple playing with their healthy baby, and urging: "Safeguard Baby's Right to Be Born Healthy. Every expectant mother should go early to a physician for an examination and blood tests."

P: Every doctor of Ingham County, Mich, (in which Lansing, the State capital, is located) is making a blood test of every patient who comes to him for no matter what ailment. Tests will continue through the middle of March.

P: The American Institute of Public Opinion established by survey that the majority of U. S. residents interviewed are in favor of Federal clinics for the treatment of venereal disease.

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