The educational screen (c1922-c1956])

October, 1943 Page 287 or even war are but small and temporary calamities." If our films induce the inhabitants of malaria-ridden areas to destroy malarial-mosquito breeding places adjacent to our military bases in the other Americas, who will say how man)- lives we niay have spared in Keokuk, Iowa? Motion pictures are the most appropriate and effec- tive means of waging our health war in the other Ameri- can republics. Those per.sons most in need of health and also most susceptible to the promises of a so-called better life extended by .Axis propagandists, are persons of lower economic status, many living in rural areas where adequate medical care is not available. It is among these people that illiteracy sustains its highest rates. Consequently, the citizens of the other Americas who are most important to us are tho.se who cannot be reached by the printed word and who do not own radio sets. To these persons films offer the most vivid presentation possible and one that is not dependent on the ability to read. Films are doubly effective because of their emotional appeal and because they show what to do and how to do it. It is appropriate that this country, which pioneered in the development and ]3rogress of the motion pictures with its mass appeal should rely on the motion picture to sustain the democratic system in this and other countries. How do health films help ? The debilitating lassitude of hookworms is attacked by film showing how to build simple, sanitary privies which break the hookworm cj'cle of diseased man, to earth, back to man. Does it work? Doctors of the Rockefeller Foundation reduced the incidence of hookworm in vast areas of the South Pacific by stimulating the construction of such privies. However, they found that unless lectures, charts, movies and other educational devices brought an under- standing of the nature of the disease and why privies should be used, inhabitants of the infected islands ignored them. Films on malaria show how to find malarial-mosquito breeding places and present simple home-made methods for killing larvae.- Films on ty- phoid emphasize the danger of unsanitary sewage dis- posal and the menace of the fly which carries the germ from exposed infected refuse to man's food. Other insect borne and filth born diseases are fought by films illustrating graphically the vulnerable point in the dis- ease cycle at which attack can successfully break the circle. Films on .syjihilis indicate the ravages of the disease, providing powerful persuasion to the thoughtless, to exercise personal restraint and caution. Venereal dis- ease clinics for controlling the spread of the disease are championed by films showing that it costs a community less to cure syphilis than to ignore it. The mere exhibition of health films is valueless un- less concrete beneficial results may be directly attrib- uted to their use. The field of public health is one of the few in which it is possible to establish a clear relationship between films and results. A few weeks ago, one of our films on syphilis was shown at the School of Medicine in Port-au-Prince. Haiti. ,\ group of leading citizens of Haiti was invited to a second .screening. In a meeting held after the showing, the group formed a national anti-syphilis league and at once made preliminary plans for a pro- gram to reduce the national venereal disease rate. In Guayaquil, Ecuador, Dr. Mauro Madero Mo- reria. Director of School Hygiene of the Province of Guyas, was so impressed with our health films that he arranged with two local theaters for the exhibition of Three scenes from Walt Disney's production, "The Winged Scourcp " a f^lr- on r-alaria, made under the auspices of the Office of Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs.