The new statistics emphasized that gonorrhea is now the paramount VD problem, but that syphilis has moved up from fourth place to third among reportable diseases; that the increase in VD in the last few years has shown up in all age groups and is not primarily in teenagers or other young people...

Two CLAIMS of VD control have been described in these pages, one in an Alabama prison and one in China. The first is probably acceptable at face value but doesn't help us much. It related only to syphilis, and we could hardly think of applying the methods used to the whole population.

Both Edgar Snow and Felix Greene, American and Canadian observers respectively, speak of the sex practices of the Chinese and the attitudes they reflect. There is, on the one hand, a new equality of women, and on the other, a discouragement of premarital or extramarital sex.

Additional information comes from sources that are likely to be trustworthy, especially since different observers are in pretty good agreement. For example, a report datelined March 2, 1969, by the Canadian journalist Colin McCullough, tells us that in 1949 there were eight medical schools in all of China, and only 20,000 doctors trained in Western medicine.

When he returned from a visit to North Vietnam in June, 1969, Henrik Beer, Secretary General of the League of Red Cross Societies with headquarters in Geneva, was reported in the press as having spoken highly of doctors and social workers there, and as having said that civilian health had improved despite wartime shortages. He spoke of measures for control of a number of epidemic diseases but said nothing of VD.

Birth control information and materials (an intrauterine device rather than pills, which were considered unsafe even in 1968) are freely available in hospitals and clinics, but there is no campaign to encourage their use. A sharp rise in the rate of infected abortions from 5.7 per 100,000 live births in 1959 to 30.7 in 1965 was explained "by a high ranking Ministry official" on the ground that during the first few years of the Castro regime...

The story for Cuba is a little different. Willis P. Butler, the American doctor from Hawaii, who was there for several weeks in 1968, reminds us that the Communist regime had been in existence less than a decade at the time of his visit; so that what progress had been made, allowing for an inevitable lag in the beginning, was very recent indeed.

The Soviet Union is known to take a somewhat puritan view of sex activity, presumably unrelated to the doctrine of original sin. Perhaps "puritan" is the wrong word; and perhaps a foreign observer cannot avoid measuring what he sees and reads against his own prejudices. Soviet actors and dancers do not flaunt sex as ours do; their people, young or old, are not constantly stimulated by sex on television or in display advertising.

In the more than thirty years since those words were written as we know, the U.S.S.R. has had its ups and downs, has be, through another devastating war, and has emerged as a technological and industrial power rivaling the United States. We know that it has had problems of urbanization and restless you! Somewhat like our own.

It remains to look at some Communist countries other than those on the eastern fringe of Europe, among which there is tantalizing evidence of VD control surpassing that of the rest of the world. We saw before that the U.S.S.R. seems to have had some success in control of syphilis, but less with gonorrhea; that Cuba, for which our information is meager but we are in a position to snatch at straws is reputed to have done well with gonorrhea but not with syphilis; and that China may have been so successful in controlling both diseases that Dr. Ma, who is given credit for the job, can now devote his energies to the control of other diseases.