In response to your request just received, I have forwarded to you a copy of each of our Reports which I will ask you to hand to the French Consul with my compliments. I was just about to write to you, to ask at what time during 1901 you omitted to disinfect bedding or clothing. I think that you wrote that about August 15th, you no longer required such disinfection, but I cannot find your letter. Again: Can you not give me some of the data with regard to your fight for control of the epidemic in Santiago de las Vegas? Did your results show by the prompt suppression of the epidemic in that town that you were adopting the right measures? I have just been asked to write an article for the English Journal of Hygiene, setting forth our observations, as well as the work of the Medical Department in Cuba, and I should like to mention Santiago de las Vegas as well as Havana, giving you, of course, full credit for the results obtained. I haven’t your December report as yet. Please send me a copy of it. I never was quite so busy in all of my life and sigh for the 3d of April, when I can get this class off my hands. How is your epidemic in Havana? How I would like to run away from my present surroundings and go on a “toot” with you and Kean!
Please let me hear from you promptly, as I must prepare my paper by the end of February. Remember me very kindly to Mrs. Gorgas....
Sincerely yours,
Reed.
(15)
Havana, Cuba, January 22, 1902.
Major Walter Reed,
Surgeon General’s Office,
Washington, D. C.
My dear Reed:
Yours of January 14th received. The sending of clothing and bedding for disinfection to Las Animas, in yellow-fever cases, was stopped about (text missing). The official order was issued August 21, 1901. We have a large disinfecting plant at Las Animas to which everything of this kind is sent. When a house is disinfected for diphtheria or any similar disease, the room itself is infected with formaline gas and washed down with a bi-chloride solution “and all fabrics and clothing of every kind are sent to the disinfection plant”. Up to the time mentioned this had been done in the case of yellow fever, but, having become convinced that the mosquito was the only way of transmitting the disease and that no good could be obtained from this process, we stopped this method.
From my experience here in municipal sanitation, I think this is of the greatest importance, viz: to put people to as little inconvenience and loss as possible by methods of disinfection. The destruction of mosquitoes in a building can be accomplished with very little annoyance to the inmates but the thorough destruction of fomites causes a great deal of inconvenience and some loss.
The all important matter in yellow fever is to get your cases reported as thoroughly as possible and this can only be done with the co-operation of the people. I am therefore of the opinion that the great element of our success was due to the fact that we did away with the attempted destruction of fomites. You can readily see how one unreported case might start an epidemic.