Chapter 69 Must pay attention to sanitation, epidemic prevention and medical work

(September 9, 1951) All central bureaus, sub-bureaus, provincial and municipal party committees, prefectural and county committees: Comrade He Cheng's report [1] is very good. After you receive it, you can publish it in party journals and attract the attention of leading comrades at all levels.The Central Committee believes that the lack of attention paid by party committees at all levels to sanitation, epidemic prevention, and general medical work is a major shortcoming in party work that must be corrected.In the future, we must regard sanitation, epidemic prevention and general medical work as a major political task, and do our best to develop this work.Health workers must be led and helped.Sanitation work must be checked in a timely manner.In terms of funds, in addition to those listed in the central budget, funds should be raised locally as much as possible.Cadres must be educated so that they understand that, as far as the current situation is concerned, the annual human, animal and economic losses suffered by the people of the whole country due to diseases and deaths caused by lack of sanitation knowledge and sanitation work may exceed the annual losses of the people of the whole country from floods, droughts, and windstorms. Therefore, at least health work and disaster relief and prevention work should be treated equally, and health work should never be underestimated.

Central Committee of the Communist Party of China September 9, 1951 Published according to Mao Zedong's manuscript. -------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------ note [1] Refers to the report to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China on September 7, 1951 by Secretary of the Party Leadership Group and Deputy Minister of the Ministry of Health of the Central People's Government, He Cheng, on national epidemic prevention work.The report summarizes the achievements and shortcomings in the work of health work following the three principles of "facing workers, peasants and soldiers, focusing on prevention, and uniting traditional Chinese and Western medicine" since the founding of New China, and proposes that in order to achieve the desired results in the epidemic prevention work, we must Party and government leaders at all levels pay due attention to it, but many leading party and government cadres below the provincial and county levels only regard it as the responsibility of the government to prevent people from starving to death, and do not pay enough attention to people dying of illness due to unsanitary conditions. Unavoidable "natural disaster".Far more people actually died from disease than from starvation, most of which were preventable.