WESSEX FILMS PRESENT
CRUSADE FOR HEALTH
THE CHANGING FACE OF EUROPE
NARRATED BY JEAN MARCHAT
"Whoever will teach me the art of healing,
"with him will I share my substance.
"His offspring will be my brethren
"I will impart the knowledge of healing by all manners of teaching."
So ran the oath taken by physicians of ancient Greece.
The secret
of all good life lies in good health.
This they believed,
here on the slopes of Mount Ida, 2,000 years ago.
"Whatsoever house I enter," the Greek doctor solemnly vowed,
"I will enter for the benefit of the sick."
From ancient Greece,
this humane teaching spread throughout Europe.
Today, Europe returns her thanks to Greece in kind,
to help her heal her wounds.
An automobile
driving on these dusty roads is bound to be noticed.
The news has spread from village to village.
The ambulance brings a Norwegian doctor,
a Danish nurse,
and a Greek nurse from Athens,
with the International TB Campaign.
The priest and the mayor are waiting for them.
The villagers are intrigued.
The children have stopped playing,
and are keen to know what the doctor is saying.
He's explaining to the mayor and the priest
that in Greece, each year,
thousands of children die of tuberculosis,
but they can be protected through vaccination with BCG.
He and his team are dedicated
to preventing and fighting
tuberculosis.
"Thousands
"of children die from TB every year",
the loudspeaker proclaims.
"They can be saved.
"Vaccinate your children to protect them."
The next morning,
the children are quietly waiting their turn near the school.
"Whoever teaches me the art of healing, with him I will share my substance.
"His offspring will be my own brethren.
"I will impart the knowledge of healing by all manners of teaching."
It doesn't really hurt, even if Fanoula is making a face.
She likes to put on an act.
And she wouldn't miss the chance
to show off her scar and all it would bring her!
Throughout the old continent,
we live surrounded by wonders bequeathed by our ancestors,
the legacy of our children.
We mustn't be blinded by our past.
We must face the hovels
we have allowed to grow beneath the aqueducts of Rome.
Should this be
the only trace of our presence?
Have we nothing to hand on but this?
Some have thought to leave a worthy legacy,
so their children inherit the best.
But what about
the shoe shiners,
the beggars,
wasting their youth amidst indifference.
They are without inheritance.
You can't tell a child: "Tomorrow you'll feel better."
For tomorrow is nothing to him.
We must act today.
Our own needs,
our own plans can wait.
Children can't and mustn't wait.
Europe's foremost duty is to set the feet of the young
on the road to a better life through better health.
By Lake Geneva,
stand the headquarters of the World Health Organization,
the body set up by the United Nations,
to combat sickness worldwide.
News of an epidemic from the Middle East.
Health authorities around the Mediterranean basin
must be warned at once.
Sickness knows no frontiers,
especially in the years following a war.
That is why the means to fight it cannot stop at frontiers either.
European nations unite for a crusade for health
on a continental scale.
Here, in Sweden,
nurses are trained for international service
with the Red Cross.
Norway,
with a health system second to none in Europe,
sees assistance to poor countries as her special duty.
They send boatloads of food and medicine
to remedy the effects
of malnutrition.
Few Norwegians
have ever heard of Delvinakion
a small, remote village in Greece,
almost completely vacated by the Civil War.
But the Norwegians know that in hundreds of villages like this,
children just like their own are hungry.
And that's enough.
Thanks to them,
and their generosity, these children can eat.
TB claims a victim somewhere once every 7th second.
Danish laboratories produce much of the BCG vaccine,
discovered by French scientists Calmette and Guérin.
Help comes from America too.
This new sanatorium in Lamia, Greece,
was built as part of the European recovery program.
With equipment such as this, never available before,
doctors can begin to get to grips with illness
which has sapped people's health for centuries.
Different setting, same purpose.
In this Italian hospital,
cancer can now be detected at an early stage.
Treated in time, cancer patients can be cured.
Treating a case of cancer of the jaw.
The equipment
is Italian and was bought through American aid
counterpart funds.
Radio isotopes come from an English atomic energy research centre.
Every nation is contributing
to a great cause,
but the task is greater
than any one nation could perform alone.
However, public health and cleanliness
are not always a matter of costly buildings
and ultra modern equipment.
Elementary precautions
can be taken without too much effort.
In Greece,
in some areas, goats are still milked as in Homer's day.
Changing practices isn't easy,
especially when they're older than time itself.
The World Health Organization, actively addresses these issues.
It looks prosaic enough, talking around a table,
but when words translate into action,
good results can be brought about.
Geneva
takes us to Missolonghi,
a small town by the Ionian Sea,
that barely seems to keep its head
above the putrid waters of the surrounding marshes.
A certain Englishman came here once
to champion the cause of insurgent Greece.
He contracted a so-called "ague" and died of it.
The Englishman was Byron.
And the ague that killed him, malaria,
carried by mosquitoes breeding in vast amounts in the swamps.
An extensive swamp sanitation campaign
launched a few years ago.
Mosquito eggs are destroyed before they hatch,
by spraying DDT on the water surface.
And when the DDT has done its work,
on this land
ever haunted by misery and death,
rice will be grown, and life will flourish again.
Teams of doctors and technicians
visit 5,000 villages in the malarial zone,
cleansing every house,
testing the blood of every child
to prevent the scourge.
Fighting illness is not the WHO's only purpose.
In countries most afflicted by the war,
it helps refugees,
and orphans.
Koula's parents were shot right before her.
Haris and Maria never went to school because a bomb destroyed it.
Pascalia was left crippled.
When she needed help,
the doctor was busy with soldiers.
Today, these young girls forget the horrors of civil war.
They get back their youth and their hope.
They're learning a trade now: cooking or childcare.
These children are attending summer camp
for the first time.
They've never owned a ball.
Even if our generation cannot rid ourselves
of the sickness and evils of war,
this does lie within our reach:
to give youth a good start in life.
Long ago, in Crete,
they believed the gods admired
the harmonious union of a healthy spirit
and a healthy body.
The secret
of a good life lies in good health.
This they believed in Greece
2,000 years ago.
As to us, the designers of Europe's destiny,
we are striving to provide a better life
to all people, young and old,
with the best the present can offer,
and with lessons of the past as our inspiration.
The fulfillment of this great destiny
lies in the ancient motto:
"A healthy spirit in a healthy body."
THE END
Subtitles: Ariane Fénart & Élisabeth Fuchs