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99
Report of the Medical Officer (Education).
Lastly, tlie reserve powers or the child must be cultivated, lhe absolute necessity for tree
exercise and fresh air means the need for playground areas beyond those attached to the schools. The
children will have to be enticed into playgrounds if they are to live in towns and maintain normal
health ; houses will have to be pulled down in order to obtain the spaces required.
To summarise, reaction to unhealthy environment is shown by the 30 per cent, of children who
suffer from "tonsils and adenoids." Breathing drills call the attention of the teachers to the existence
of the condition, and mouth-breathing due to catarrhal causes is diminished by the habitual use of
the handkerchief. A considerable proportion of cases need surgical operation ; this may be extremely
good in its results, but under the conditions in which it is at present carried out among elementary
school children, is unsatisfactory in about two-thirds of the cases. Rational treatment, by preventing
the ill-health of which these symptoms are the associates, would be the use of all means to prevent
catarrhal attacks and all that serves to raise the child's reserve powers. The chief causes of catarrh
in earliest life are the baby's comforter, ignorance and dirt. Room to live on the land is the principal
need ; house room and all that it connotes ; school room ; free spaces of land for ventilation, pulling
down buildings to provide opportunity of free play for children ; the provision of chances of cleanliness
and the tonic effects of school baths. The expenditure of any sum of money on the health of children
is of more national importance than its expenditure on the health of adults.
Attention has been drawn frequently to the vast mass of national inefficiency due to dental Teeth.
disease originating and neglected during childhood. The conditions in existence are indisputable,
80 to 90 per cent, of the children suffer from steadily advancing caries. The chief causes of this
widespread disease are still doubtful and the remedy is not to be sought entirely in the toothbrush
or dental chair. These merely mitigate results of deeper origin associated with the difficult conditions
of infancy in overcrowded rooms and frequently with artificial feeding.
The nutritional conditions of the first few months of infant life are of the greatest importance.
It has been shown in the Report for 1905 that years of high infant mortality correspond later with
crops of children whose measurements are below the average, and this gives a clue as to why it is that
the districts in large towns where there is high infantile mortality also show stunted populations. The
occurrence of bad nutritional conditions, more particularly rickets and convulsions, has been associated
with honeycombed teeth in later life, and slight cases of lamellar cataract. Indeed, it is stated that this
last defect was noted as exceedingly rare in Australia until the advent of condensed milk, since which
time it has become comparatively common. Dr. Pollock has followed up these lines in his school
examination by enquiring of parents whether the children presented were breast fed or bottle fed,
and tried to correlate this to the dental conditions found in the permanent teeth.

So that the advantage of soundness of teeth is greatest in the naturally fed children at every age.
12532 N 2