The Birmingham age-herald., 1911-03-03
Famine Death Toll Is Far More Terrible Than
 the Plague
OFFICIALS DESERT
 AFFLICTED PEOPLE
Believed That Government Is Trying to Suppress Knowledge of Real Conditions and Are Not
 Rendering Aid

Pekin China, March Examine and the plague are sweeping over China. The known deaths from the plague number SO,oo0 and according to the of ficial statistics the death rate aver- ages 200 daily. But the officials have litle knowledge of the conditions in the
 interior or if they have they are not permitting the facts to be known
 There are few foreigners in the interior and conditions there for this reason are not attracting much public atten | tion.
 i! It is impossible even to estimate the number of deaths that have resulted from lack of food. pr. Samuel Coch- ran, an American who is engaged in the work of relief. writes:
 ''One million people will die before the first crop is harvested. This will be scanty, because the people have not the strength to till the soil, and no animals remain for blowing"
 The Chinese are directing themselves to control the plague chiefly along the railroads and frontiers for political reasons. Since the recent Russian re- quest for permission to cross the bor- der and quarantine Chinese towns along the Amur China has been at tempting to check the plague along that frontier, but the Russian legation
 says this has been done ineffectively
 because there are no doctors there who are familiar with modern methods of 1 lsanitation.
 People Deserted
 Local authorities, including the police
 and soldiers, in former epidemics left
 the people to die; now they do not
 care or do not know how to maintain
 adequate sanitary measures. Although
 the central government has issued ex-
 plicit orders, both supplies and funds
 are lacking Japanese and Russians
 have both offered assistance but only lin few places have these offers been
 accepted the Chinese not liking to re l. lceive favors from foreigners whose Ipolitical motives they distrust
 Physicians engaged in combating
 with the disease are of the opinion
 that warm weather will kill the germs, Ialthough it may only bring on tenn
 porary respite. If the plague were of the bubonc type, the summer heat
 would serve to augment it, bubonic be-
 ing conveyed by fleas, rats and other
 vermin which thrive in warm weather. 1 The pneumonic type, on the other handi lis transmitted through the respiratory lapparatus and as consequence when 1the Chinese emerge from their winter louarters into the open air they will escape much contamination. It is said 1 by the medical authorities that sucii an epidemic as the present one, whlcn lis entirely pneumonia, has not visited
 the world since the middle ages.
 Famine Worse Than Plague Owing to the political question involved and the presence of foreigners along tho railways the plague in Manchuria Is re- | ceivlng greater attention than the famine' 1 but the oeath rate from the famine IS many times greater than that from the 1 plague The famine is the result of the destruction Of the crops by fall or 10 | inches of rain in two days last Au- 1 gust in a district where the people ordi- | narily have n hand-to-mouth existence. | As soon as the first bangs of hunger were | felt the people left their homes, but many | of them were unable to get beyond the
 borders of the devastation They returned | and tool, up the death struggle oesiue l their homesteads
 l A relief committee composed of foreign
 CTS at Shanghai is collecting money. So l far Japan and America are the only for 1 eign countries that have contributed to aid the sufferers. but even the extensive | assistance that has come from the United | States is entirely inadequate. It Is esti- mated that 100000 persons are without | food and are existing on roots, grasses
 or anything affordng the slightest nourishment. Those possessing grain guard it night and day. st l Missionaries who are distributing relief l tell of many tragic oecurrences-a man on | his way to meet them dying as he was returning to his family with a packet of l rice They describe the people as hor- rible skeletons some of them with the limbs hdeousy swollen From the famine 1 the death rate is several thousand daily.