"Our City, Yours & Mine"

Every morning, through the streets of New York rumble huge, silver-colored trucks. On the back of each truck is a sign: Our City, Yours & Mine. Keep It Clean.

These fancy street-cleaning wagons are only one of several public-health improvements which have taken place in New York City during the last six years. Others were enumerated last week in a little volume published by Health Commissioner John Levi Rice. Title: Advances in New York City's Health. Edited by Savel Zimand (known to some colleagues as "Zymole Trokeys"), the report was quickly gobbled up by colleges all over the U. S. as a reference book on public health. The few remaining copies now rest in the Department's safe. Excerpts:

> Although the city spends only 76-c- a year on the health of each citizen, New York has a good health record. In 1939, out of a population of 7,500,000, deaths totaled 75,439, second lowest rate for the city ever recorded (lowest: 1938). There were large decreases in maternal and infant mortality; in deaths from scarlet fever, diphtheria, typhoid, pneumonia, meningitis, measles.

> In the past six years the Department built eleven health centres and a laboratory. Last year nearly 140,000 persons were X-rayed for tuberculosis -- an all-time high -- and hundreds of new cases discovered. The Department helped diagnose, treat and prevent such diseases as syphilis, gonorrhea, tuberculosis, pneumonia, typhoid, diphtheria. Private practitioners make ample use of the Department's laboratory service, which helps diagnose rare diseases such as parrot fever, leprosy, tularemia (rabbit fever).

> Last year the Department sponsored the spectacular five-day intravenous drip treatment for syphilis (TIME, April 22). It is now analyzing 25,000 records of heart-disease cases, keeping close tabs on youngsters with rheumatic heart disease, No. 1 killer of school children. Next big problem, says Dr. Charles Frederick Bolduan, Di rector of Health Education, is control of diabetes. Over 75,000 New Yorkers are diabetics.

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