cure, presents a special problem because of the difficulty of securing social acceptance for their return to the community. At the end of the year well over six hundred cured lepers and nearly eleven hundred cured tubercular patients were on the register. Some had been given training at the Wong Tai Sin Vocational Training Centre, or were found accom- modation in resettlement estates. A rehabilitation centre for drug addicts with an initial capacity of two hundred and fifty is now firmly established by the Society for the Aid and Rehabilitation of Drug Addicts at Shek Kwu Chau, an island near Cheung Chau, and Lutheran World Service also runs a club for ex-drug addicts. An important week's seminar on drug addiction, sponsored jointly by the Hong Kong Discharged Prisoners' Aid Society and the Secretariat for Chinese Affairs, in which all the interested Government departments and six major voluntary agencies participated, was held in October. Wide recommendations made for the development of work in the treatment and rehabilitation of drug addicts are being studied by Government through its Narcotics Advisory Com- mittee and the Secretariat for Chinese Affairs which has been charged with the co-ordination of work on this intractable social problem.
62. The welfare of industrial workers is primarily the concern of the Labour Department; but the Special Welfare Services Section in- vestigates the family circumstances of all workers who have been killed or severely disabled in industrial accidents, and advises on the best form and frequency of payments under the Workmen's Compensation Ordin- ance, in the interests of the beneficiaries. In a hundred and seventy-four cases of fatal accident, the family conditions were investigated, and about a hundred and twenty earlier cases were reviewed.
63. The social workers in the Special Welfare Services Section of the Department aspire to perhaps a greater degree of specialization than their colleagues elsewhere. Work with those suffering from some handicap of body or mind, and the duty to find ordinary jobs in the ordinary world for people who are at sight not ordinary do, among their other responsibilities, require special talents which however exercise general professional skills. Among miscellaneous duties, the officers of this section interviewed, in accordance with the Asiatic Emigration Ordinance 1915, almost nineteen hundred women and children who were leaving Hong Kong by ship; the purpose of this obsolescent enact- ment is mainly to prevent trafficking in women and children (see Appen- dix 13).
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