DISCUSSION 
group of women who were informed that this substance might 
or might not work; they were instructed to take it from the 
10th through the 18th day of the menstrual cycle and they failed 
miserably—frankly, they couldn’t count to 10! Then the man 
who was conducting the experiment suggested that they take 
the pill from the 5th to the 25th day—this is a regimen which 
has been used successfully for anti-ovulatory compounds in 
Puerto Rico and other places—and this worked somewhat 
better in terms of taking the pill regularly. (Unfortunately this 
substance didn’t have the effect in the human that it had in 
animals.) We have found that the only variable to which 
faithfulness in pill-taking seems to be related is sophistication: 
the more sophisticated the woman, the poorer she is at using 
the pill; the more illiterate, the more poverty-stricken the 
woman is, the more faithful she is. Dr. Eleanor Mears has 
reported very similar results here in England: people who, 
using every other contraceptive method have been miserable 
failures from her point of view, find the pill method easy 
because they take a pill a day. 
Hoagland: Ina talk on the contraceptive pill that I gave to 
physicians in Cairo I pointed out that the new Aswan High 
Dam would increase the arable land by perhaps 30 per cent, 
but by the time it was finished, seven or eight years hence, the 
population of Egypt would have increased 30 per cent, so that 
the population increase would negate much of the advantage 
of the dam from the point of view of increase in arable 
land. Recently President Nasser has come out strongly 
for birth control measures and family planning clinics 
throughout Egypt, so that the pendulum has swung in favour 
of control. 
Pirie: I should like to comment on Norman Wright’s idea 
about putting contraceptive substances into salt. If you con- 
sider the amount of opposition in Britain to putting fluoride in 
the water, I feel that the acceptability of such a scheme in a 
non-totalitarian country is likely to be negligible. Furthermore, 
one has to consider the variation in consumption. The Swiss, 
as you probably know, were interested in putting fluoride in 
104. 
