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HE foregoing tentative program for child welfare activities during the "Children's Year" has been prepared by the State Department of Health and the Women's Committee, Ohio Branch, Council of National Defense. The program has been presented to a group of child welfare workers, men and women, and endorsed by them.

The greatest effort possible is to be made during this crisis to reduce. the loss of life among the children of Ohio. To do so will require various ways and means and each community will have to devise a number of schemes to solve its own problem most satisfactorily. The program is a tentative one and is such that any single piece of its children's work may be organized and developed in a community. The individual community is not expected to follow out all of its details except in the very large cities, where most of the different activities have already been established. Even here, it will depend upon the approval or otherwise of the local workers.

Measurement Test First

On the other hand, in every community in the state, however small, some contribution to the general work should be made. The first definite piece of work to be undertaken will be to place Ohio on the map in the drive for the weighing and measuring test of children under five, to be carried on by the Women's Council of National Defense.

For the actual work in this campaign the women of the state will be fully organized. There will be eighty-eight county chairmen, each one of whom will have as her advisers at least a group of local men and women. She will also have captains and lieutenants in all parts of her county. These women will carry the cards into those homes where the mother cannot attend a conference. Where it is possible for the local workers to organize group conferences under the supervision of doctors and nurses, the cards will be filled out there. It will in this wise be possible for any mother, urban or rural, to register her child if she wishes to do so.

Test Simple in Nature The questions must necessarily be very simple and the results not scientific in their reliability but every particle of information gathered in this wise will be so much to the good. In Ohio, as in other states, we know but little anywhere

and in most places nothing at all of the whereabouts of children of the pre-school age.

Ohio has been assigned a quota of 4,510 babies as her share of the 100,000 which the campaign is supposed to save. Definite assignment of local quotas has already been made by the State Department of Health to the eighty cities and eighty-eight counties. A number of these counties have already been fully organized and the women are waiting for the Federal Bureau to send them the actual registration blanks in order that they may begin

active service.

School Survey Later

The initial campaign will occupy three months and it is a little soon to say what the next step asked as a state-wide movement of these women will be. In the fall, at least, a concerted effort will be made to gather through the activities of the women a large amount of definite information as to the condition of the schools in the state.

The school furnishes a concrete factor which almost any mother can recognize. It is that place which absorbs the greatest amount of her children's time and in the past in some localities she has been singularly indifferent to a personal knowledge of its sanitation, its regard to the physical welfare of her child and any knowledge as to whether it is doing all physically for her child which she has the right to demand. We have in Ohio now the county superintendent system, will soon have operative gov

ernment grants for vocational activities in the schools, and in many places the beginnings of the physical supervision of children. On this last score especially in the smaller places there is much to be accomplished. One potent factor in bringing about this much desired result is bringing a large group of women into contact with their problems and teaching them to know what they have a right to demand for their children.

Big Possibilities in Ohio. There are few states in the union which are better organized today in this work and very few more prosperous ones. If the intelligent interest of the men and women in Ohio shall be brought properly to bear upon these questions the state can surely go very far toward correcting certain glaring defects.

These are merely parts of the children's welfare program which it is hoped will become a real force in the general health propaganda in the state of Ohio.

PHYSICIAN IS BLAMED

FOR SERIOUS EPIDEMIC Twenty cases of whooping cough, one death and the closing of the community school for four weeks or longer is the result of the failure of a family physician to report and have quarantined an original case of whooping cough in a prosperous community in North Carolina.

The physician visited the home of the first case, pronounced it whooping cough but neglected to report it to the county quarantine officer, whereby it would have been quarantined. Meanwhile other children in the home contracted the disease, continued to go to school, and spread the infection to epidemic proportions,

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S A FIRST STEP in the drive in Ohio to reach the quota of 4,510 lives under five years of age apportioned to the state to be saved during the current year, an estimated saving by counties and cities has been figured. The apportionment for Ohio was made by the Children's Bureau on the basis of the 1910 census. It represents a thirty per cent reduction in the loss of life under five years of age in 1916.

Census figures showing age distribution for all sections of the state not being available, the apportionment for counties and cities was made on mortality figures for 1916. Mortality figures for 1917 are not yet ready for publication. The cities in the state are responsible for over two-thirds of the

deaths of children over five in 1916 and a total saving of 3.022 represents a fair quota for cities, leaving 1,488 for counties outside of cities. If the census method of apportionment had been used for certain parts of the state, some of the counties would have a quota to save exceeding the actual loss of life under five years of age in 1916 within the county. On the other hand, the cities like Cleveland and

Cincinnati, with census figures of respectively 62,512 and 29,172 children under five years of age in 1910, would have their quotas reduced to 588 and 135 children to save this year. On the basis of mortality in these two cities in 1916 they should save 827 and 310 babies respectively.

This conservation, made on the basis that we accept 4,510 babies as a possible reduction to be brought about in the state during 1918, is a big task and could only be actually accomplished by the united effort of men and women in every part of the state. Because of the very much more highly organized machinery for the reduction of infant mortality which exists at the present time in our large cities, it is only fair that they should make the largest contribution to this campaign for reduction. Because of these facts it is hoped that the large cities will accept the great responsibility which this plan imposes upon them and do all in their power to reduce their loss of life.

The following table presents the apportionment of the 4,510 children to be saved by the eightyeight counties and eighty cities:

15,349

10,072

5,277