majority must have been directly or indirectly victims of malaria.

But where steps as stern against malaria are taken as are required for the eradication of yellow fever, the results are magnificent. In Italy an anti-malarial campaign cut down the number of deaths from 16,000 a year to 4,000. In Greece, on the plains of Marathon, in 1906, 90 per cent of the sickness was due to malaria; in 1908 only 2 per cent of the sickness was due to it.

The wonderful results attained in fighting malaria at Ismailia, on the Suez Canal, surpasses anything that has been done in any part of the world. In 1900 there were 2,284 cases of malaria in that town. Sir Ronald Ross was called there to consider methods of banishing the disease, and laid out a program in that direction. In 1901 the number of cases fell to 1,990; in 1902 to 1,551; in 1904 to 90; in 1905 to 37. Since that time there have been no cases reported except such as were infected before visiting Ismailia. The malarial mosquito was absolutely exterminated there something which probably has not been done in other part of the earth. One might go on indefinitely citing cases where cities and districts have arisen in their might to put an end to malaria and with magic results.

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HOOKWORM DISEASE VANQUISHED

If vast consequences have grown out of the solution of the mysteries of yellow fever and malaria, they are probably no greater than are destined to come to the people of tropic and semi-tropic regions through the mastery of the hookworm.

Around the earth there stretches a belt 66 degrees wide, embracing 47 countries and an area of 15 million square miles, in which there lives a population of nearly a billion people. This belt is the hookworm belt of the world. How many cases of this distressing and strengthwrecking disease there are in this vast territory cannot be estimated with any degree of approximation.

In 1904 some 90 out of every 100 of the working population of Porto Rico

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had the disease. In Colombia 90 per cent of the people living between sea-level and the 3.000-foot level were suffering from it. Fifty per cent of the people in British Guiana are said to be afflicted. Not less than 1,800,000 of the people of India are reported as having the disease, and in the southern part of China it is estimated that three out of four people are sufferers.

The economic loss involved is beyond estimate. In Porto Rico the physically sound coffee-picker picks from 500 to 600 measures of coffee a day; scores of those suffering from hookworm disease can pick only from 100 to 250 measures a day. In some regions it is estimated that not more than 33 per cent of the natural efficiency of any force of men can be exercised because of the terrible problem of hookworm disease.

Yet hookworm disease is about the most easily mastered of all the diseases in the category. Its cause is easily demonstrable to the laymen, even to the ignorant layman, because he can see, without the aid of a microscope, the little hair-line worms that cause it. Its spread is easily checked, because the wearing of shoes and a little care against soil pollution is all that is demanded.

A SIMPLE AND EASY CURE

It is easily cured, because in most cases simply a dose of epsom salts, followed by a dose of thymol, and that in turn by another dose of salts, is effective. Thymol is made from the thyme of the garden, and is just about as simple and as harmless in its action as the epsom salts. If the first treatment does not answer, the second one usually will. Furthermore, the disease is one that lends itself admirably to the getting of quick results. It converts a lazy, sickly, good-for-nothing boy or girl into a sprightly, energetic one in the course of a few weeks.

That has been the secret of a major portion of the success of the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission in its work of ridding the South from the disease. The results were so striking that the States and the counties were glad to help along the task. Tens of thousands of so-called "poor white trash" have been cured of it,

and the results are so visible that the work is spreading everywhere. The fight of the commission and its forces is to establish sanitary privies in the country, and to teach the children and their parents that either the prevention of soil pollution or the wearing of shoes will prevent the disease, and that both together insures one against it.

The remaining problem is one of getting the people who have the disease to take the salts-thymol course of medicine. In Porto Rico, Dr. Bailey K. Ashford and his associates have cured well nigh half a million cases, and the work is still going on to the extent of some twenty thousand cases a year.

The entire work of Dr. Ashford in Porto Rico has been a wonderful success. He went there with a death rate as high as that at Panama. The people were hopelessly ignorant, wholly indifferent to sanitation, and without a single idea of the cause of ordinary diseases that are contracted by infection. But with all that, the principles of sanitary science that were laid down in Cuba triumphed in Porto Rico as brilliantly as they have triumphed anywhere else in the world. Notwithstanding the fact that they were handicapped for funds and had hookworm disease added to their list of troubles, Dr. Ashford and his aides were able to bring about a death rate that is lower than that of Panama itself today.

WONDERFUL RESULTS IN THE PHILIPPINES

What happened in Porto Rico finds something of a counterpart in the Philippines. When the Americans took possession of Manila the death rate averaged 46.11 a thousand during a period of four years. By strenuous work and a faithful adherence to the principles of sanitation there were laid down in Cuba, the death rate has been forced down until it is now about 35 per thousand.

A death rate reduced in the same proportion in the United States, with our present population, would mean a saving of 1,100,000 lives annually in this country. They were able over there to make a showing of a death rate of only 4.84 per thousand among the employees of the Philippine government. They had cholera knocking at their doors all the time

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and several times running past their defenses. But they have kept hammering away year in and year out, and have set a record in public sanitation there that is a fit companion-piece to the work at Panama and Porto Rico.

They have cut down the number of new cases of leprosy each year from 700 to 200, and have reduced the number of lepers in the island from 5,000 to 2,000. They had a hand in proving that beriberi is a disease caused by a prolonged diet of polished rice. The phosphorous in the pericarp of the rice is needed by the system and its absence is responsible for the disease. Chickens fed constantly on polished rice contract the disease, while those fed upon unhulled rice never do. But perhaps the most striking achievement in the Philippines has been the practical abolition of smallpox. When we went into the Philippines there were 40,000 deaths a year from the disease, where today there are only about 300 a year. Vaccination triumphed.

THE NEW ERA

Throughout the latitudes where insectborne diseases reign a new sentiment has arisen which promises, under the stress of persistent campaigns of education, to sink deep into the public mind. Its motto is the banishment of these diseases.

The fundamental principles of the fight are expressively laid down in simple terms ike these: "No mosquitoes, no malaria, no yellow fever, no dengue. No fleas, no bubonic plague; no lice, no typhus; no tsetse fly, no sleeping sickness; no ticks, no spotted fever." Wherever governments have power to get back of these campaigns and compel the people willy-nilly to adopt the proper measures, remarkable results can be obtained.

Not only does sanitary science open up the tropics for the benefit of man himself, but for his domestic animals as well. When the United States took over the Philippines there had been introduced a terrible epidemic among cattle, carabao, and horses. The disease promptly was diagnosed as the terrible rinderpest. It killed untold thousands of head of horses, cattle, and carabao, in some places nine out of every ten dying from the disease.