RAND HEALTH PROBLEM.

Dominion, Volume 7, Issue 1949, 5 January 1914, Page 5

RAND HEALTH PROBLEM.

AMERICAN EXPERT SENT FOR.

LESSONS FROM PANAMA

'■One event whioh marked the virtual completion of tho task at Panama received but little attention in the IVss " says the New York "Nation." "At the end of October Colonel William C. Uurgas left the Isthmus for New York accompanied by two of his fellow-work-ers, of whom one was Dr. S. T. Darling, bacteriologist at Amcoh Hospital. ."It is now a commonplace, that the work of Colonel Gorgns made tho Work of Colonel Goethals possible/ Before Culcbra could bo conquered, yellow fever and malaria had to be overthrown. The task was accomplishodvwith Colonei uorgas as commander-in-chief of the army of sanitation in the field and Dr Darling as tho general staff in the bacteriological laboratory. Their departure from Panama was hastened by tho fact that for the good as for the wicked in this world there is no rest. Summons to south Africa. "The summons had come from South Africa, where tho miners of the Band, numbering an army of workers greater than that-assembled at Panama, .havo been tho victims of tho pneumonia scotirgo and other endemic disease, itc authorities at Johannesburg found it natural to turn for help to 'Colonel Gorgas m his capacity as consulting specialist to sick regions of tho earth. Yellow fever' has become an 'historic disease at Panama, no endemic ease having occurred since 1906. Malarial fever has been reduced from 1200 case* per thousand of tho population in .1903 —an average of more' than one case for each person—to 81 per thousand in ISJI2. Tho attention of tho world will now bo fixed upon Johannesburg. "Tho special conditions which will confront Colonel Gorges on the Rand arc different from those he has had to deal with in Cuba am! Panama. To tho laymen there can be no similarity between Colon, virtually at sea level, with a maximum summer temperature of 100 degrees and an annual rainfall of 210 inches, and Johannesburg, lviii" nearly six thousand feet, high, with S bracing winter climate and a rainfall of 26 inches. But malaria is no respecter of altitudes. "To-day we know that the discaso is not due to any mysterious 'miasma' rising from moist soils, but is tlio result of parasitic infection. We have fallen into tho habit of speaking of tropical diseases as if the tropics alone were the homo of micro-organisms fatal to human life. But that is simply because the white man is comparatively new to the tropics. It is merely that maladies which the white man <<ucmintcrs in his work- of subjecting the now areas of the globo impress themselves on his attention more dramatically than tho endemic plagues from which ho suffers at home in the temperate same. Grooming an Isthmus. "Colonel Gorges, who now goes to Johannesburg, was sent to do at Panama what he had already dono in Havanamake clean, healthy living conditions," says Ray Baker in the "American Magazine." "Out- of a disease-ridden jungle Colonel Gorgas, begianing nearly three years before Goethals came, has made* the Isthmus to-day as healthy a place to live in as any in America. I met an agent of tho Maryland Casualty Company at Panama who wan writing'hoalth mid accident insurance at the sumo rates that are charged in New York City, and the business is.more profitable. The whole Isthmus has been combed and gloomed; tho water supply has been mado pure: the ditches and waste places havfi either been filled' or eohnwef; all garbage and refuse is burned; the-houses 1 are screened, and scrupulous caro' is exercised in the dkBOMI of B«WK£e.'^. H ,, ■ ■■■..