CHILD WELFARE AND DISEASE UNDER WAR-TIME FOOD CONDITIONS IN CENTRAL EUROPE

Reports which are beginning to reach us from central Europe bring confirmation in new ways of the seriousness of the food situation that has confronted the belligerent nations there in the past two or three years. Although an unusually large incidence of epidemics may be interpreted as representing the consequence of widespread malnutrition which offers more ready entrance to the invasion of infections, such a conclusion is by no means the inevitable one. Thus, the outbreak of influenza in many parts of the world can scarcely be adduced as proof of the existence of inadequate food supplies where the malady occurs. But, on the other hand, whenever deficiency diseases come into unusual prominence it may be taken as almost axiomatic that food conditions are somehow disturbed. The accounts of the appearance of "war edema" have focused attention on dietary difficulties referable to war-time conditions. And more recently the descriptions of