Joint Distribution Committee Supports 300 Medical Institutions in Twenty Countries

The Joint Distribution Committee today made public a report revealing that the organization is currently supporting 300 medical institutions providing care for 82,000 patients monthly in 20 countries abroad. These include 43 medical centers and 14 health centers in seven countries in the Moslem world where about 41,000 Jews are being treated each month.

The report, submitted by Dr. Jacob J. Golub, chairman of the J.D.C.’s Health Committee, said that appalling health conditions in the Moslem countries “have made it necessary to expand services in North Africa and to introduce urgently needed programs in sections of the Near East where modern medicine is virtually unknown.”

Dr. Golub outlined three medical goals to be achieved by the agency in 1950s 1. Improvement of health conditions in North Africa and the Near East where facilities are still inadequate to meet an overwhelming need; 2. Providing mass examinations in 20 transient centers for 15,000 Jews each month en route to Israel, the U.S. and other lands; 3. Caring for the “hard core”–the aged, sick and handicapped who cannot emigrate and cannot become self-supporting.

Dr. Golub revealed that the bulk of the Jews in Europe have now been restored to health, but some 37,000 each month will still require the J.D.C.’s health services. “The vast majority of today’s sick, some 30,000 are ‘hard core,’ still bearing scars of the Hitler ora. They will require full-scale assistance for years to come,” he declared.

At the same time the J.D.C.’s medical advisor reported that mass examinations, provided each month for 15,000 men, women and children who come into the agency’s transient camps in Marseille, Bari, Algiors and other points of embarkation, hoping for speedy transportation to Israel, reveal a high incidence of disease among North Africans. “Some 18 percent must be held back for treatment,” he said. The TB rate among 28,000 Tripolitanians was four times higher than the rate in the U.S., while in the same group 900 children suffored from trachoma, favus or malnutrition.

Equally urgent, Dr. Golub revealed, are needs in Iran. “In this land, the home of 90,000 native Jews, where ‘doctor’ is an honorary title not implying completion of medical studies, the J.D.C. recently appropriated funds for a modern medical center to combat TB, malaria and virulent skin diseases endomic to this area.” Further complicating the health situation in Iran, Dr. Golub disclosed, wore 7,000 destitute Jews who crossed the border from Iraq and 2,500 Kurdish Jews who fled to Tohoran from primitive tribal areas in northwest Iran. “For these refugees,” he said, “the J.D.C.’s first task was to remove herb bags from the necks of the sick and replace these relics of a modieval age with penicillin, streptomycin and DDT.”