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Lawrence | ie&etober
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o ABOUT? HEALTH

THE DOUGLAS COUNTY HEALTH UNIT, City Hall, Massachusetts Street, at
llth, functions daily from 8:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. Come in and tell
us your troubles.

ANENT STATISTICS »

STATISTICS are always dry--and should be. They are dead, finished,
erystallized--and should be. We need a few stabilized statements of
facts and collections of such statenents for study and comparison.
Any change, forward or backward from such statements would be other
Statistics. , |

Let me hope you are interested in knowing that 74 persons died in
Douglas County during the first half of 1944. In the same period 105
people died in the city of Lawrence. Births were respectively 96 and
153--one woman lost her life in her effort for motherhood. Five bab-
ies were stillborn--2 in the county and 3 in Lawrence. There were 16
deaths from cancer of which probably more than half might have been
prevented. In the county, 1 dicd of tuberculosis and in the city ll.
All of these should have been prevented. There were 10 fatal accidents
in the county and 9 in the city--19 in all. At least 10 of these

should have been prevented or avoided.

Summarizing to this point, there were at least 50 preventable deaths
in this county the first half of this year. If the average age was 40
and the average expectancy was 25 years when they dicd, we lost 750
years of human life, well up to the life of the man who made the re-
cord for longivitys

Suppose these people worked 300 days a year (which they probably would
not) their untimely deaths mean a loss to us of 225,000 labor days.
Say the average work day will be 6 hours, this means « loss of 1,550,
000 hours of more or less productive labor. Computed on present price
of 3 hours for $2.00 this means a financial loss of $900,000.00. Add
to this the $7500.00 or so that their funerals cost and we conclude
that if we could savo only a quarter of this loss a $15000.00 annual
budget for health would show an interest return that would make any
Shylock's voice tremble and his eycs snap.

RATS

Speaking of money and thinking of rats reminds me that our sanitarian,
Howard Weindcl, who recently did some special work on rat control in
Denver, knows a lot of interesting things about rats. When he has time
he tells things about them. He says they have something like a symbi-
osis with human kind, i.c. in goneral they live only where people do,
make their nests or houses almost entirely of materials that have beon
handled by humans and like to live in places in or near where people
visit frequently.