DREDGING A COLON STREET
So near tide level is the surface of Colon that the dredges made canals in the public streets
Col. Gorgas first visited the Isthmus in 1904. In a little pamphlet which I have before me he then described simply the essence of the problem he had to meet. He found camped on a hill, perfectly drained and supplied with good water, 450 marines—who of course were men of exceptionally good physique, robust and vigorous. Yet in four months 170 out of the 450 were infected with malaria, and Col. Gorgas said, “if these men were our laborers, working daily in Culebra Cut, exposed to the sun and weather, many of these cases would be severe in type and at the end of the year we would be approaching the mortality of the French”. The cause for the infection was apparent. Though the marines’ camp was clean and sanitary there was at the foot of the hill, on which it was perched, a village of 400 or 500 Jamaica negroes. Examination of the people showed that all suffered from chronic malaria. The marine strolling in the village would be bitten by a mosquito—the anopheles which is partial to malaria—which had already bitten an infected negro. The result was the spread of the infection among the marines. As Col. Gorgas put it, “The condition is very much the same as if these four or five hundred natives had the smallpox and our marines had never been vaccinated”. To correct this condition he proposed, “to take this village, put it under a systematic scheme of inspection, whereby we will be able to control all water barrels and deposits of water, so that no mosquitoes will be allowed to breed, look after its street cleaning and disposal of night soil, etc., so as to get it in good sanitary condition, then have the population examined and recorded, so that we will have on a card a short history of each individual and keep track of them in this way. Those suffering from malaria will be put under treatment, and watched as long as the malarial parasite is found in the blood. I hope, in this way, to decrease to the smallest limit the number of anopheles, the malarial-bearing mosquito, and, at the same time, to gradually eliminate the human being as a source of infection, so that at the end of a year it will be entirely safe for an unacclimated man to live in this village”.
THE WAR ON MOSQUITOES. I.
The men are oiling the surface of the streams to kill the larvae
THE WAR ON MOSQUITOES. II.
Burning the grass that affords cover
Being appointed Chief Sanitary Officer Col. Gorgas put this plan into effect not only in that village but in every part of the Canal Zone, particular attention being given to the cities of Panama and Colon. In these cities the visitor will be impressed with the comparative cleanliness of the streets and sidewalks and the covering of all garbage receptacles. No other Central American city shows so cleanly a front. Screening, however, is little in evidence. How great the mortality had been under the French it is impossible to tell. Their statistics related almost wholly to deaths in their hospitals and very largely to white patients. Men who died out on the line, natives who worked a day or two and went back to their villages to die were left unrecorded. In the hospitals it was recorded that between 1881 and 1889, 5618 employees died. The contractors were charged a dollar a day for every man sent to the hospitals, so it may be conjectured that not all were sent who should have been. Col. Gorgas estimates the average death rate at about 240 per 1000 annually. The American general death rate began with a maximum of 49.94 per 1000 sinking to 21.18, at or about which point it has remained for several years. Among employees alone our death rate was 7.50 per 1000. The French with an average force of 10,200 men employed, lost in nine years 22,189 men. We with an average force of 33,000 lost less than 4000 in about an equal period.
THE WAR ON MOSQUITOES. III.
Spraying the brooks with larvacide
