The Pacific commercial advertiser. [volume] (Honolulu, Hawaiian Islands) 1885-1921, 1908-06-30

During the Spanish-American War a
committee appointed by the surgeon
General of the Army found that ty-
phoid was not so prevalent among men
who ate in screened tents and that as
the fly disappeared in camps at Knox
willie and Meade, typhoid greatly de-
creased DIR. H. A. Veeder claims that
the fy is a more dangerous agent IN
spreading typhoid than either water OF
milk. J. o. Cobb of the Marine Hospi-
tai Service has proved the fly carrier
of tuberculosis bacilli. Investigators
in the Philippines found cholera spread
by fruit that had been exposed on
public stands and infected by flies. In
Chicago two women from Hull House
conducted exhaustive experiments TO
discover the cause of a typhoid cpl
demic in a certain quarter and after a
study of foods, screening, sanitation,
water and milk supplies, finally proved
the fly to be at fault.
The medical world is working to get
the nation to understand the great
need of using an ounce of prevention
rather than a pound of cure. The
microbic origin of desease as discover
ed by Koch. Pasteur, and Lisner is not
so very old, but it has revolutionized
modern thought. Pittsburg is already
conducting a notable campaign in the
study of typhoid, and san Francisco,
believing disease is spread by rats, has
recently had $500 caught each day for
work in her bacterologi-
-cal laboratories. Southern cities with
screens and kerosene, are annually an
ticipating any attack from the mos
quito and her yellow fever germs, and
New Jersey is keeping a watchful eye
on the mosquito that has become
known as the dissemination of malaria.
1t is claimed that half of the $751;
0O0. 900 now being paid out by the
government in pension money could
have been saved had the nation been
as eager to prevent disease as it has
been to cure. Camp fever" and
prison fever have been accepted as
necessary evils of war. and until Japan
estab lished a record of only one death
of disease in her army to two casualty
in battle, the world had for two CEN
turtles lost from preventable disease
five times as many as it had lost in
battle. In the Franco-Prussian War
sixty per cent of the deaths were from
typhoid. and in the Civil War three
fourths of the deaths were from that
and other diseases. The nations shame
and browning imbecility was reached
jim the Spanish American War, when it
was shown that on September TO- 1898.
ninety per cent of the force were on
the hospital lists. while in Porto Rico
there were 262 deaths from disease TO
three killed in battle. Many of these
diseases were those spread by the busy
and unclean fly.
. The war on the fly is being conducted
along both educational and practical
lines. Through circulars. through the
press. through lectures. through house,
toulouse Canvasses in slum districts
and country sides. people are to be told
the very scientific but very revolving
truth about the flies that daily swarm
through unscreened homes. trailing
their way across the food on the tables
across the faces OF the children and
on everything that is to be touched.
eaten or handled. They will be told
that these flies breed in the filth of the
sta bles and that it is from this pest
heap, from impure drains. from open
sewers and disease-laden ground that