Page:Tropical Diseases.djvu/309

XIII] even be visited; or, if visits have to be made to them, they should be as brief as possible, and not made after sundown. The susceptible should not sleep in the lower storeys of houses, and should pay great attention to general health, carefully avoiding all causes of physiological depression or disturbance. Sailors must not be allowed on shore.

In every country subject to visitations of this disease the sanitary condition of the towns should be most carefully attended to, especially as they refer to the stegomyia mosquito. All water- tanks and cisterns must be effectually screened by fine-meshed metallic gauze; all puddles and stagnant water abolished; all cases of any kind of fever, no matter how mild they may be or what their nature, must be reported at once to the central sanitary authorities, who should have full powers promptly to screen or otherwise deal with them and the houses in which they are. Any delay in recognizing the earliest cases of a threatened epidemic, as shown by experience in New Orleans, is most dangerous, leading, as it may, to the rapid multiplication of infected centres. Ships should not be allowed to clear from infected ports, nor to enter non-infected ports during the warm season, without adequate inspection. If, on entering port, yellow fever is found on board, the cases should be isolated in a quarantine hospital where there are no stegomyia mosquitoes, the ship thoroughly cleared of mosquitoes, and the passengers and crew prevented for at least five, better thirteen, days from communicating with the shore, or until every risk of conveying infection has passed away.

In the event of the disease appearing in a locality which is not habitually a yellow-fever centre, and of which the population is small, an economical plan of dealing with the threatened danger is for the authorities promptly to remove the entire population of the neighbourhood, with the exception of the insusceptible and those in attendance on the sick, and to place the deported population, before disper-