Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/380

376 Let us consider lastly a disease which collects the last toll from one seventh of humanity, and debilitates and enfeebles the lives of many whom it does not entirely destroy. At all ages, in infancy, in the prime of life, and in life's decline, it snatches away the best of our fellowmen. How are we organizing our campaign against tuberculosis? Bacteriology has taught us that it is an infectious disease and has isolated the organism. It is an undoubted fact, proven to the hilt by many inquiries and observations, that infection passes from individual to individual. How is this knowledge being applied, and how are we attempting to stem the tide of infection? In the United Kingdom alone about 70,000 persons die annually of the disease, and all over the civilized world the total death roll of human kind annually from tuberculosis probably does not fall short of a million souls. This tide of infection is kept up, year in, year out, and every 70,000 dying annually in Britain must have infected 70,000 fresh victims before they themselves are carried away. Can it not be stopped, this foul tide of infection? What is being done to stop it? Sanatoria are being provided for the early cases, the bad and most infectious cases are largely being left alone to sow infection broadcast and then die. This is the chief means being used at present to stop the tide. The early non-infectious case is deemed the more important to look after, and the well-advanced, open, thoroughly infectious case is left to itself to infect others and then to die. This is the condition of our public health attitude in regard to tuberculosis. It is a travesty on the application of all biological laws, and in direct opposition to all laws of racial preservation. Industrial conditions have produced an artificial environment and enhanced the chances of infection by the organism of this disease; it should be our plan to copy nature's method and safeguard the interests of the community, and to do this we must proceed on the plan of separating the source of infection—that is to say, the infectious individual from the sound individual. This is done with success in the case of smallpox and cholera, and this plan has eradicated hydrophobia; why should it not be carried out in the case of tuberculosis? Under present conditions men, women and children are going on unwittingly infecting one another by the thousand with tuberculosis in school, workshop and home, and we who know it take no public action and raise no clamant outcry against it. It is of more value to the community to isolate one pauper far advanced in tuberculosis than to send ten early cases to sanatoria. This disease must be stopped at its source as well as dealt with on its course. No disease has ever been eradicated from a community by discovering cures for it, and none ever will; many diseases have disappeared because their sources have been cut off.

Let us be scientific, let us search out the truth; having found it, let us act upon it, and let us conceal nothing that is true.