ose On Healza 18 Continued from Page W “Our health services, quite frankly, are breaking dom, This is happening because of distant centralized planning that does not meet our particular needs, becui.se of the largely inappropriate nature of the clinical-curative system of health care in our islands environ- ment and because even that system has been crippled by the discontinuation of many field nealth services due to budget constraints. "Our education system is also in a critical condition. Too few new facilities hwe been built for the growing ropulation. Facilities built during the early period of empfusis on education are deteriorating or have been destroyed by storms or tropical climatic conditions. Declining real-dollar budgets restrict high school matriculation to as low as 40 percent in several states. Moreover, our primary school In general, our public attendance rate is less than 70 percent. high school students graudate with the equivalent of a fith grade education by U.S. standards and with inadequate linguistic skills to fonction in a modern economic system or to increase productivity in fisheries and agriculture." --Vice President Petrus Tun, Federatcd States of Micronesia. ".,.The problem of basic health in Micronesia is not simply a hard battle that is in the process of being won; it is, on the contrary, a hard battle that is steadily being lost. We are not slowly but surely developing a cadre of trained medical personnel in Micronesia; we have been rapidly losing mecial personnel. We are not slowly but steadily building up stockpiles of medical supplies. Such supplies are being depleted as precious budget dollars are diverted for other purposes, notably minimal maintenance operations. "It profits Micronesia very little to build a new hospital if there are no qualified medical personnel to staff it or if, as hae happened, one sends a sick child to a shiny new hospital only to find that the hospital has no antibiotics and not even an aspirin. One extreme fear on this subject will perhaps best be portrayed by relating the unofficial results of recent health surveys in various parts of the Federated States of Micronesia that have shown an alarming incidence of active tuberculosis in children entering grade school in Ponape and an equally alarning number of cases of leprosy in the States of Truk and Ponape. Trends such as these are not indicative of progress on the health front. "Serious as such problens are...we have mentioned them only to emphasize that the Trusteeship must be :erminated. We have reached the point of diminishing returns from a well-intentioned expatriate administration centralized at a point far distant from our lands, our waters and our culture..." ~-Asterio Takesy, Federated States of Micronesia. EQS Statsoe ee ",..The Trusteeship Agreement, in effect, provides the Administering Authority with an instrument whereby it can declare our country domestic territory where convenient and foreign when U.S. bureaucratic interests so dictate, This highly arbitrary and unjust interpretation of the Trusteeship Agreement is a direct affront to the principles of the Trusteeship system..." ~-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Anton DeBrum, Marshall Islands.