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Show Health Day May 1 is National Child Health Day. President Coolidge regards the day so highly that every year, he writes to Secretary Secre-tary Hoover, president of the American Child Health Association, Asso-ciation, to emphasize the need for general interest in child conservation. Here are a few facts which should cause every citizen to cooperate with the President and the agencies back of National Na-tional Child Health Day. Of the 1,500,000 of our population who die each year, it has been estimated that 42 per cent die from preventable causes. The waste occasioned by this preventable loss is estimated esti-mated at a billion dollars. Forty thousand school children die each year from causes caus-es which are preventable. There are 400,000 cases of typhoid fever each year, ten per cent of which are fatal, and 75 per cent of these cases are unnecessary. Diphtheria, which is considered preventable and for which there has been a curative for thirty years, takes the largest toll of death among children of any five common communicable com-municable diseases. Of all crippled adults, one-third receive their injuries during the first six years of life and a very large percentage are needlessly handicapped. One hundred per cent of all mental defectives are recognizable recog-nizable during the first six years of life. Says Mr. Hoover: "It is no wonder that Child Health Day has taken hold of the imagination of the nation. The need for it was so great. Each year, the results will double until it has become a national habit, an almost subconscious impulse, to remember the child wisely, constructively, from the day that parents are born until the day their children become parents, that is, always. Then no words of any one man or woman will be necessary in defense of the nation's will that its children shall be well." |