Suffering Little Children

The problem was so big and so basic that men on both sides of the Iron Curtain got together last week to discuss it. They were worried about the 30 million children in Europe who are not getting enough to eat. For the moment, politics was put aside.

The delegates came to Paris from twelve European nations that are getting aid from the U.N.'s International Children's Emergency Fund (an UNRRA successor), which is helping feed 4,000,000 children, pregnant women and nursing mothers. The anti-Communist Italian delegate interpreted for the Bulgarian comrade. On the Fund's staff are men of 13 nationalities; the director is an American; his deputy is from Tito's Yugoslavia.

They exchanged some grim statistics: the height and weight of traditionally healthy Finnish children are 10% to 15% below prewar average; the average weight of Yugoslav children is down 24%. In Italy alone, 2,000,000 children need extra rations, 220,000 have eye-destroying trachoma. Only 30% of Austria's children can be considered healthy; in Poland, 30% of the children under seven have rickets; 90% of Rumanian children have bad teeth. Tuberculosis, hunger's fellow traveler, is up everywhere: 1% of Europe's children have active tuberculosis, two-thirds of them are tuberculin positives. Among Austrian school children, tuberculosis has increased 35% between 1940 and 1946.

What to do about it? The first job, the delegates decided, is to get more milk, and to make sure it is healthy milk by setting up pasteurization plants and powdered-milk factories in the twelve countries. The second job is to vaccinate 10 million European children against tuberculosis.

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