HEALTH AND POPULATION 583 



In Europe, Dr. Aykroyd, when a member of the League of 

 Nations Health Section, started experiments of this kind on certain 

 famiHes in Roumania, in connexion with the prevalence of pellagra. 

 The greater uniformity of African diets should make controlled 

 methods in such research easier than in Europe. 



Such experiments call for specialist knowledge from a number 

 of different fields. It seems that results could be achieved best by 

 a special team of workers sent out from Europe — say a doctor, 

 a biochemist, a social anthropologist, and an agriculturalist. Given 

 twelve months in an area carefully defined to present a few major 

 problems, results should be expected which would be of the first 

 importance to Africa, and indeed to the world as a whole. Apart 

 from such special work, however, it would be desirable that the 

 training of medical officers for work in the tropics, should include 

 nutrition as an important subject. 



In several British colonies dietetics committees have been set 

 up in which medical, agricultural, forestry, veterinary, and geo- 

 logical departments co-operate. It is worth noting also that, in 

 spite of the prevalence of diseases in Africa, for which malnutrition 

 is partly responsible, a high level of physique and health is often 

 attained by individual members of African tribes on diets of 

 extreme simplicity. In this respect Europeans may have something 

 to learn, as well as to teach. 



PHYSIOLOGY AND DEVELOPMENT OF AFRICANS 



The necessity for fundamental research on the physiology of Afri- 

 can races was stressed in strong terms by the Pan-African Health 

 Conference of 1935. The subject had already been discussed at 

 the conference of 1933 on the Co-ordination of General Medical 

 Research in the East African territories (Conference, East Africa, 

 1934a), when it was decided that such work should be inaugurated 

 at the medical research laboratories at Nairobi, the necessary 

 apparatus being purchased by contributions from the several ter- 

 ritories. Until some standards of normality have been established 

 for the metabolism of natives, any appreciation of deviations from 

 the normal and any steps taken to correct them, must remain 

 largely a matter for conjecture. Normal figures for the basal meta- 



