Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 90.djvu/198

 The Lesson Denmark Taught with Calves

Have you heard of Dr. Bang ? He freed Danish cattle of tuberculosis in a simple way, which New York City is now applying to poor, stricken children

By A. M. Jungmann

���The babies at the Preventorium spend twenty-four hours in the open air. They are kept for about four months, during which time every effort is made to correct the home conditions

��ONE of the most important steps ever taken in preventive medicine is directly attributable to the care Denmark lavishes on her cows. Dr. Bang, a Danish veterinary, whose task it was to conserve cattle which were threatened with extermination through the ravages of tuberculosis, discovered that calves of tubercular parentage are not necessarily tubercular themselves. His course was ob\ious. He simply took new-born calves away from their tuberculous mothers and fed them on sterilized milk from a bottle. They grew up into healthy cows quite free from tuberculosis. Since then Denmark has adopted the Bang method of fighting tuberculosis and freed her cattle from that dread disease.

How Children Are Saved by the New Plan

Dr. Alfred F. Hess is responsible for the application of Dr. Bang's method to New York's children. Until the Tuberculosis Preventorium for Children v.as opened at Farmingdale, New Jersey, we neglected to avail ourselves of the greatest weapon in

��the warfare against tuberculosis — that of saving the children from the disease.

Infants who become infected with tuber- culosis when under one year of age rarely recover, and those who contract the disease between the ages of one and two years have a very poor outlook. Young children who are cared for by a consumptive mother or who are in daily or hourly contact with a consumptive father, can scarcely be ex- pected to avoid infection. In conducting an investigation of one hundred and twenty homes wherein one or more of the adult members of th.e family were suffering from tuberculosis, Dr. Hess found forty-two infants under two years of age. Without exaggeration, that means forty-two infants doomed to succumb from tuberculosis. In many of the one hundred and twenty homes two or more infants were exposed to it.-

Instead of adopting Bang's method, why not send away the tubercular member of the family? That is not always practica- ble. A mother cannot be spared from the household, for the very reason that she has an infant to care for as well as other chil-

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