Losing Front

It sometimes looks to skeptics as if medicine is moving in a circle. It has made great strides against the germ diseases. But medicine is only fighting a delaying action against the omnipresent group of diseases roughly described as "degenerative" (disorders of the heart and blood system, cancer, diabetes, etc.). Last week New York City's Health Commissioner Eraest L. Stebbins published a bulletin which showed how mankind is making out in its war (see chart).

Based on New York City records (considered typical of U.S. cities), the chart shows the general trend of changes in death rates, by diseases, since 1930. Thanks to universal vaccination, sulfa drugs, penicillin, etc., the mortality from most germ diseases is dropping toward the vanishing point (diphtheria deaths, for example, dropped from a yearly average of 1,290 in 1910-19 to seven in 1944). But deaths from degenerative diseases have risen sharply, and are still rising.

As germs are brought under control, the proportion of oldsters in the population rises. Thus, the rise in degenerative diseases is not surprising: they are common diseases of old age. But doctors are convinced that, given as much money as has been spent for research in the war against germs, they could do something about physical degeneration too. Chicago's Dr. Herman L. Kretschmer drew a moral in the Journal of the American Medical Association: "Prevention of chronic [degenerative] illness begins with . . . proper personal hygiene, right living and suitable diet ... an annual physical examination."

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