Millions v. Germs

Congress last week agreed to inject the U. S. with $3,000,000 this year, $5,000,000 next year and $7,000,000 in 1940 to exterminate the germs which cause syphilis (Treponema pallidum), gonorrhea (Neisseria gonorrhoeae), and the third but least harmful of the major venereal diseases, chancroid (Hemophilus ducreyi). The money is to be allotted to State and city health officials to buy medicines, to pay doctors and clinics for treatment of venereal victims.

The U. S. Assistant Surgeon General, solemn, tight-voiced Raymond Aloysius Vonderlehr, specialist on these diseases, figures that the U. S. has 6,000,000 victims of syphilis, 12,000,000 of gonorrhea. He does not know how many suffer from chancroids. Gonorrhea, he says, afflicts three times as many men, women and children as tuberculosis, four times as many as scarlet fever, 27 times as many as diphtheria, 58 times as many as typhoid, 100 times as many as infantile paralysis.

Said Dr. Vonderlehr: "Gonorrhea may be said to be the great epidemic disease of the human race, and little is done about it."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.