抄録
Today, rural communities in Japan are on the brink of a ruin, and the rapidly deteriorating social conditions there have exerted a harmful influence on the health of farmers.
During the work for protecting health of the inhabitants in a village of Ehime Prefecture, it was noticed that a considerably low level of community health has reflected on the high frequency of anemia.
It is noteworthy that most of the anemic cases result from overwork and unbalanced nutrition caused by poverty.
In our last investigation on 1389 inhabitants, anemia was found in 28.0% of the male adults, 25.7% of the female adults, 40% of the old people. The mean hemoglobin level was 14.58±1.63 in the male adults, and 12.57±1.51 in the female adults.
It is urgently necessary to take effective measures to correct the situation.
As causal factors, we can enumerate distorted dietary life, overwork, and physiological phenomena peculiar to women, such as pregnancy and delivery, in the case of women; and overwork, a general decline of bone marrow functions, and the secondary anemia caused by other diseases in the case of old people. The establishment of a system of community health control is needed more than anything else.
