Martinsburg herald. [volume] (Martinsburg, W. Va.) 1881-1920, 1916-01-15
APPROPRIATION IS
SOUGHT FOR WORK
Public Health Service Wants Help
to Extend the Rural
Sanitation.

Sanitation.
In asking for a special appropria-
ton of 100000 with which to expand
the field work of the public health
service, especially with respect to
rural sanitation, Secretary of the
Treasury McAdoo is seeking the
means of applying more widely prov
ed methods of lettering health condi-
tons.
An assistant surgeon general of the
public health service was travelling in
the mountains of Tennessee last sum-
mer in connection with one of the
ield Investigations of the service. In
little mountain town he lunehed
with the local doctor.
Amy pellagra here?" the federal
health officer happened to ask.
Il have one case nova woman"
answered the local physician. Would
you ike to see her after lunch? It's
+. just across the street"
A glance told the visiting expert
from Washington that the patient was
well on the road to recovery. He
remarked to the sick woman:
''Your doctors medicine seems to
have helped you.'
"He won't give me any medicine"
she replied as though somewhat ag
grieved He just feeds me milk,
eggs and meat"
Il use the Goldberger treatment"
the mountain doctor explained and
added: This year | have had twen-
ty-six pellagra cases and all have re-
covered"
Some six years ago pellagra threat
ened to become a national scourge.
The number of its victims spread
and neither cure nor alternating rem
edy was known.
To make the story short, a long
course of investigation was begun by
surgeons of the public health sery-
ice. most conspicuous among whom
was Surgeon Goldberger. He had had
experience in studying beri-beri in
the Philippines and concluded that
pellagra, in that it was a dietary dis
ease, resembled beri-beri. Roughly,
it is not impure corn, but "too much
corn"-varied with corn syrup, mo-
lases and fats ("sow BELLY which
causes the disease. This is a diet
common among the poorer people of
the south owing to the increase in
the price of eggs, milk, meats and
legumes (pess, beans. etc. That
such food caused pellagra has been
demonstrated not only by cures
wrought by change of diet but by
demonstration upon perfectly we'll
conyicts of the Jackson. Mississippi
penitentiary that the corn diet causes
the disease. OF eleven convets put
upon an experimental diet last April,
six developed the first symptoms OF
pellagra after five months on the diet
knowledge of these facts enabled
Surgeon General Rupert Blue, of the
Public Health Service, to remark the
other day:
Figured purely as business propo
sitiOn, the discovery of this simple
method of treating and preventing
pellagra pays the entire cost of the
maintenance of the Public Health
Service since it was established.
The remaining task is simply that
Of educating the general public into
knowledge of the cause, so that the
very simple precautions necessary to
the cure, and prevention may be gen
orally applied"
Public Health Inquiries.
Field investigations of this kind are
not confined to the one disease or to
one section of the country. They are
directed along many lines and have
to do with malaria, typhoid, tuber
culosis, trachoma. ETC.
1t is estimated that expert use oil
$4,000 at Roanoke Rapids. North Caro-
lima, recently earned about 100 per
cent, or 100000. in the better health
and increased efficiency of labor in
the cotton mills at that place
Roanoke Rapids was a malarial