Abstract
THE East African Parliamentary Commission has started on its long journey, a journey fraught with great and manifold possibilities. If any assurance was needed that scientific matters would receive their fair share of attention, it is to be found in the fact that Major A. G. Church, a member of the Medical Research Council, is one of the Commissioners. No such assurance is, however, required, for Mr. W. Ormsby-Gore, the chairman, is fully alive to the important part which scientific knowledge plays, and must continue to play, in the development of our tropical possessions. He has not forgotten the lessons learned in the West Indies, and realises that many of the same problems will be found in East Africa, together with others peculiar to what was once called the Dark Continent. Indeed, he and those with him are well aware that it is in the main owing to the triumphs of science that the old opprobrious title is no longer wholly applicable, but they are also persuaded that much more light requires to be shed on many difficult questions before the darkness which at present enshrouds them can be fully dispelled. Human, animal, and plant diseases will engage their attention. All three are closely linked, perhaps more closely linked in Africa than anywhere else in the world. Examples come readily to mind: there is human sleeping sickness and animal trypanosomiasis, which the Commissioners will find in every territory they visit, and one thinks also of the calamity of a heavy aphis infection of millet and the famine which may follow it, and of the desolation which locusts leave in their track and the dire effects of their inroad upon both man and beast.
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Current Topics and Events. Nature 114, 323–325 (1924). https://doi.org/10.1038/114323a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/114323a0