Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 62.djvu/361

Rh increase in population, notwithstanding the general improvement in the sanitary condition of towns and cities. This is no doubt due to the continued pollution of water supplies and to the extension of this infectious disease in rural districts. It is in fact now an endemic disease in nearly all parts of the United States.

According to the census report of 1900, there were 111,000 deaths from tuberculosis during the year 1900. This does not, however, include the deaths in certain states in which the vital statistics are incomplete or unreliable, and it is probable that there are at least 145,000 victims of the great white plague annually within the limits of the United States. The last census return in those states where registration was approximately correct, including a population of about 21,000,000 people, shows that 12 per cent, of all deaths resulted from pulmonary tuberculosis, 8.5 per cent, from pneumonia, 3 per cent, from typhoid fever and 3 per cent, from diphtheria and croup. These figures indicate to some extent the task which preventive medicine has still to accomplish.

A most interesting and notable example of the beneficent results following the practical application of sanitary measures based upon exact knowledge relating to the etiology of an infectious disease is afforded by the recent extinction of yellow fever in the city of Havana, which for many years had been the principal focus of infection in the West Indies, and the port from which it has been repeatedly carried to the seaport cities of the United States. According to the reports of the health officers in that city, there has not been a case of yellow fever in Havana for more than a year, and the extinction of the disease is ascribed entirely to the vigorous measures enforced to prevent its transmission by mosquitoes of the species proved by the researches of Reed and Carroll to be the immediate hosts of the yellow fever parasite and the active agents in the transmission of the disease from man to man. During the first sixty years of the past century, yellow fever prevailed almost annually in one or more of the southern seaports of the United States and not infrequently it extended its ravages to the interior towns in one or more of the southern states. So frequently did it prevail during the summer months in New Orleans and Charleston that the permanent residents of those cities commonly regarded it as a disease of the climate and a necessary evil which it was folly to attempt to combat by quarantine restrictions.

In the great epidemic of 1853, yellow fever prevailed extensively in the states of Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas and Texas. The epidemic of 1867 was limited to the states of Louisiana and Texas. Those states again suffered severely in 1873 and the states of Florida, Alabama and Mississippi were also invaded. A still more extended and deadly epidemic occurred in 1878, causing a mortality