Arizona's Health

Boosters of Arizona as a health resort were last week obliged to swallow a bitter purge compounded for them by Field Director Carl Edward Buck of the American Public Health Association. Reported Dr. Buck, after surveying the State's health ambitions and failings: "In every single one of the largely or partially preventable causes of death, Arizona has a much higher rate, in some instances three or even four times higher, than the country as a whole." Arizona's remarkable categories of death: Infant and maternal mortality, tuberculosis, diphtheria, typhoid and paratyphoid fevers, diarrhea and enteritis, motor accidents.

Although Arizona boosters gagged, Dr. Buck--who had been invited into Arizona by Arizona Superintendent of Health Dr. George Collingwood Truman, Phoenix's City Manager Evan S. Stallcup and Dean Edwin Selden Lane of Phoenix's Trinity Episcopal Cathedral--continued: ''A very considerable number of longtime permanent residents--real Arizonans--do have tuberculosis and die from it. ... The foregoing probably constitute the most important, and with one possible exception, but by no means all, public health problems in Arizona. That exception is the control of venereal diseases, or more specifically, syphilis and gonorrhea."

Cried Dean Lane when he read Dr. Buck's indictment: "Astounding but nevertheless a fact. A terrible indictment of our own citizenry and of the public administrations in the past."

This week Dean Lane & friends were to go before the Arizona Legislature to demand that Arizona, only State without a full-time health commissioner, employ one at once. Prompted by Critic Buck, Dean Lane was to urge further that each of Arizona's 14 counties and all its big cities hire full-time health officers, and that those authorities be empowered to deal peremptorily with water supply, sewage disposal and all other environmental health factors.

To sugar his bitter purge, Critic Buck last week addressed these good words to Arizonans: "Arizona has the justifiable reputation of having a very desirable climate and because of this reputation enjoys a most favorable tourist trade. No one wishes to do anything which would interfere with this trade. The safest and surest method . . . would seem to lie in emphasizing the fact (when that stage of development has been reached when one can honestly do so) that Arizona is carrying on a thoroughly modern, well-balanced program for health protection and promotion insuring the health and happiness of its people and its visitors."

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