3 CONFERENCES AT PRAGUE AND BERGEN AND THE LOOMING WAR 291Against this background, the Health Committee decided in 1934 that a
general report on nutrition was warranted and charged two of the Health
Section’s staff with undertaking it. In the early part of 1935, Étienne
Burnet, a Frenchman, and Wallace Ruddell Aykroyd, an Englishman,
prepared a report entitled ‘Nutrition and Public Health’ which was pub-
lished in the Quarterly Bulletin in June of that year. The report inquired
into nutrition policy and its implementation in the United Kingdom and
France (including the colonial areas governed by these powers), as well
as the United States, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and the Soviet Union.
Importantly and continuous with the work of the Rome and Berlin con-
ferences, the report emphasised that nutrition was not only a physiological
problem but an economic problem. It stated the following:
Production, distribution and consumption have hitherto been considered
mainly as economic problems without sufficient regard to their effect on
public health, but the effect of the economic depression has directed atten-
tion to the gap which almost everywhere exists between dietary needs as
determined by physiology and the means of satisfying them under existing
conditions. The general problem of nutrition as it presents itself to-day is
that of harmonising economic and public health development.^174The report of Burnet and Aykroyd received considerable attention and was
used as a basis for discussion of nutrition at the Sixteenth Assembly fol-
lowing a request by twelve countries (Australia, Canada, Denmark, France,
Hungary, Italy, Latvia, New Zealand, Poland, Union of South Africa,
the United Kingdom and Venezuela), that the question be placed on the
agenda.^175 Also informing the discussion was a memorandum written by
(^174) League of Nations, Report on the Physiological Bases of Nutrition, 6. See also Étienne
Burnet and Wallace Ruddell Aykroyd, ‘Nutrition and Public Health,’ Quarterly Bulletin of
the Health Organisation 4, no. 2: 323–474.
(^175) League of Nations, League of Nations Health Organisation: Report to the Council on
the Work of the Twenty-Second Session of the Health Committee, 4; League of Nations, Report
on the Physiological Bases of Nutrition, 5; League of Nations, The Problem of Nutrition, vol.
1, Interim Report of the Mixed Committee on the Problem of Nutrition (Geneva: League
of Nations, 1936), 7; League of Nations, Nutrition: Final Report of the Mixed Committee
of the League of Nations on the Relation of Nutrition to Health Agriculture and Economic
Policy (Geneva: League of Nations, 1937), 12; and League of Nations, League of Nations
Health Organisation: Report to the Council on the Work of the Twenty-Fifth Session of the
Health Committee Geneva, April 26th–May 1st (Geneva: League of Nations, 1937), Official
No. G. 219. M. I59 e 1937.111, 12.