Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 69.djvu/239

Rh healthy individuals is limited to the expectoration of persons suffering from tuberculosis of the lungs and upper air passages, the problem before us, while still very large, is less by a considerable amount than if there must also be taken into account the widely prevalent disease among cattle, swine and other domestic animals. While I do not pretend to speak in terms of great authority, yet it would seem to me that the time is not yet ripe to disregard, in attempting to suppress tuberculosis, the disease in domestic animals. Greatly as I sympathize with the active propaganda which is being made by instruction and material help to protect tuberculous human beings from injuring themselves and others, and greatly as I hope to see promoted the means of caring for the tuberculous in sanatoria, etc., yet I hope that there may occur, at this time, no relaxation in the efforts being made to control the spread of tuberculosis among cattle and to prevent the consumption of infected milk and flesh by man and other animals. That, on the other hand, the suppression completely of tuberculosis among cattle would not be followed by a great reduction in the morbidity due to tuberculosis in man is shown by Kitasato's statistics from Japan. In that country the human disease prevailed with its usual activity at a time when the cattle disease, owing to the absence of cattle, was unknown, and milk formed no appreciable element in the food of children.

In dealing with the complex problem of tuberculosis—a problem whose difficulties enlarge with the continued growth in size of cities—we are materially assisted by the knowledge of the manner in which the virus of tubercle is separated from the diseased body, the conditions of its contamination of our environment, and the avenues through which it endeavors to enter the healthy body. Though it is, perhaps, scarcely to be hoped that a time will arrive when tuberculosis will have become, through precautions against infection, as rare as are to-day smallpox and typhus fever, yet it is a most hopeful result of the crusade against tuberculosis that a marked reduction in the mortality, and probably in the incidence of the disease, has been going on in some countries—as, for instance, in England—for forty years. In New York, the system organized by Biggs has brought about a reduction since 1886 of 35 per cent, in the mortality of the disease; and while in Prussia the mortality was stationary in the decade from 1876 to 1886, since that time a reduction of more than 30 per cent, has been noted. These figures show what may be accomplished in reducing the dangers of infection with tuberculosis by a régime of education, improved conditions of living for the poorer classes, and the segregation in hospitals and sanitoria of any considerable number of the infective tuberculous during the most dangerous period of the disease.

The discovery of the microbic agent of tuberculosis naturally awakened the hope that a specific means of treating and, possibly, of