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Control population

17 January 2006, 18:00 PM
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
By Dr. Syed Nasrullah, Dhaka
17 January 2006, 18:00 PM
I would like to share my three decades experience as a General Physician and Dermatologist in a community based Hospital as to the quality of population of our country. A healthy person is an asset to the nation. The reverse is a burden. In our country we have more burdens than assets. A human being needs proper nutrition, proteins, carbohydrate, vitamins, minerals etc in the mother's womb for healthy development. The mother requires all the above-mentioned elements to give birth to a healthy baby. But what do we see in practice? Most of the mothers give birth to sick, ill-nourished babies due to poverty who become a burden to the family and the nation. The parents cannot afford proper nutrition to the babies in the intra-uterine and also first five years of life.

In our practice as Dermatologist we encounter thousands of people with defective growth and development. Skin is an organ, which can be perceived and estimated from outside unlike liver, kidneys, heart, lungs, brain etc. Skin is an excellent indicator of a person's nutrition and development.

Lower and lower middle class people are more likely to contain mal-developed skin than the others. Their skin is either dry or coarse or too thin or 'broken'. A normal skin is shiny, soft, glossy and elastic. In the upper income group we hardly find problems like Dermatitis, which springs from defective development of skin. I feel sorry for those patients and also for our unfortunate country, which is overburdened with a huge population.

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What use of those persons in the society and to the country with defective organs, mental dementia etc? They are mostly born in the under-nourished lower income group who constitute majority of our population. It's a vicious cycle. Poverty breeds more poverty. And the population keeps on increasing who are defective with very low productivity or usefulness. They are a total burden.

So, family planning or population control has to be enforced rigidly at this level. There is no scope for complacency or excuse. A mechanism has to be evolved to force the lower and lower middle class to undertake or accept the 'one child' family concept or else we are bound to be doomed as a nation.