Page:The Scientific Monthly vol. 3.djvu/149

 BOSS AND MALARIAL FEVER 143

Similar results were obtained at Port Said, Cairo, Khartoum, in Italy and Greece, in the Federated Malay States, in the West Indies, Panama, and elsewhere. In 1906, at the request of the Lake Copais Company, Ross investigated malaria in Greece, where the language itself created a natural bar to statistical information. He found a valley popu- lation of two and a half millions with 250,000 cases and 1,760 deaths. In 1905, there were 960,000 cases and 5,916 deaths. The average number of cases throughout the kingdom was 29 per cent. The Anti-Malaria League, founded by Constantinos Savas in 1905, has gone far toward making the ultimate control of the disease possible. Equally effective was the work of Angelo Celli and the Italian Anti-Malaria Society begun in 1899. As Sir William Osier wrote to the Times in 1909 :

In Professor Cdli's leetnre-room hangs the mortality chart of Italy for ike past twenty years. In 1887 malaria ranked with tabercnlosis, pneumonia, and the intestinal disorders of children as one of the great infections, killing in that year 21,033 persons. The chart shows a gradual redaction in the death- rate, and in 1906, only 4,871 persons died of the disease, and in 1907, 4,160.

Bobert Koch's work at Stephansort, New Guinea, in 1900, turned a hotbed of malaria into an absolutely healthy colony by the exclusive use of quinine and his methods were successfully applied in the other (jer- man possessions. One great discovery of Koch's was the extraordinary prevalence of tropical malaria in children^ which enabled him to attack the disease almost at its source. In 1902-5^ Captain Charles F. Craig showed that intra-corpuscular conjugation in the malarial Plasmodia is the cause of latency and relapses of the disease^ whence it was shown that malarial fever can be transmitted by human ** carriers/' apparently free from the disease themselves. The discovery of the rdle of the Siegomyia mosquito in the transmission of yellow fever by Carlos Finlay (1881) and its scientific demonstration by Beed, Carroll, Lazear and Agramonte in 1900, led to the elaborate and successful prophylactic measures by the United States Army in Cuba and Panama, which in- cluded of course the obliteration of malarial fever. A full account of anti-malarial work in all countries is given in ^'The Prevention of Malaria" (1910) by Soss and his colleagues.

To sum up Colonel Boss's achievement in the science of infection, he devised his own methods for collecting, classifying, feeding, breeding and dissecting the mosquitoes investigated by him, located the species Anopheles as the probable true vector of malarial fever, showed that the moonshaped variety of the malarial parasites is found in the body of the Anopheles, that the spores of the parasites are concentrated, not in the intestines, but in the salivary gland of the insect, and that analogous parasites may be transmitted from bird to bird by mosquitoes, thus ma^ king it possible for Orassi and Bignami to prove conclusively that the malarial parasites develop only in the Anopheles and that the disease is

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