Grim Statistics

Two candid reports on health conditions in widely separated parts of the British Empire shocked Britons and Americans last week: one on India, one on England itself. Most shocking was a cabled report from Dr. John B. Grant, 43, who is on loan to the Indian Government from the Rockefeller Foundation's International Health Division. Slightly less shocking is Our Towns: A Close-Up (Oxford University Press), a study of British town children evacuated to the country in 1939.

Dr. Grant does not describe the smell of Calcutta, the Indian habit of throwing garbage and excrement out of windows, the children running loose with smallpox nor the more or less constant state of semifamine in some sections. But his criticisms are grim enough:

> For India's 400,000,000 people there are 42,000 doctors (two-thirds of them licensed) and 5,000 nurses. The 6,500 dispensaries last year treated only 35,000,000 old and new patients.

>In all India there are only ten university-affiliated medical colleges, not one of which fulfills minimum requirements for a sound medical education.

> In 1939, malaria killed 1,500,000 Indians; cholera killed nearly 100,000 (a death rate of 29.3 per 100,000 compared with a Philippine rate of zero to .01); smallpox killed about 50,000 (a rate of 16.2 per 100,000 compared with zero for The Netherlands Indies and the Philippines). Tuberculosis is spreading.

>Most Indians can afford only cheap carbohydrate food (starches and sugar), and are starving for certain food essentials.

> Bengal has only 6,000 hospital beds for its 50,000,000 people.

>Nearly half of the districts and three-quarters of the municipalities have no qualified health officers. Of 116 second-class Bengal municipalities, only 27 have a full-time health officer, 28 have not even a sanitary inspector, and eleven have no vaccinator.

>The government assumes almost no responsibility for industrial health, which is left up to the factory owners.

India's health budget (less than $30,000,000 in 1939), like the national income ($20 per capita), is meager, but Dr. Grant says that disconnected administration and overlapping agencies prevent the Indians from getting even $30,000,000 worth of medical service. Dr. Grant believes that only a beginning can be made in a public health program at present (e.g., by establishing a few school health services), that real health progress must wait until India's 88% illiteracy rate is reduced, since much of India's bad health and insanitary practices are due to the ignorance, apathy and superstition of the Indians themselves.

British Untouchables. That the difference between Indian and British slum conditions is largely a matter of scale is revealed by Our Towns: A Close-Up. The insanitary state of the evacuated slum children was comparable to that of the Indian untouchables: about 20% of these children had head lice, especially the young ones and the older girls who never comb their hair in order to preserve permanent waves. More than a quarter of Sheffield's school children had skin diseases (most common: the itch). Many children had never been fed a hot meal, never used forks or spoons. Bed-wetting was common. Since many of the children had never seen a bathroom, they used the hearth or any convenient corner of a room instead.

Our Towns: A Close-Up was produced at the behest of Britain's ultrarespectable National Federation of Women's Institutes. The British Medical Journal calls it "horrifying" and warns readers that they need "stout stomachs."

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