THE CHIEF INDUSTRY OF THE NATIVES IS FISHING
NURSES’ QUARTERS AT ANCON
As to the part of Taboga in the economy of the Canal work, we have there a sanitarium inherited from the French, and used as a place of convalescence for almost recovered patients from the hospitals of the Zone. After breathing the clear, soft air, glancing at the comfortable quarters and enjoying to the fullest a lunch costing fifty cents that would put Broadway’s best to the test, and make the expensive Tivoli dining-room seem unappetizing in comparison, we could well understand why every employee with thirty days’ sick leave to his credit gets just such a slight ailment as needs a rest at Taboga for its cure.
Near Taboga is the leper hospital and the steamer stops for a moment to send ashore supplies in a small boat. Always there are about 75 victims of this dread and incurable disease there, mostly Panamanians with some West India negroes. A native of North America with the disease is practically unknown. The affliction is horrible enough in itself, but some cause operating for ages back has caused mankind to regard it with more fear than the facts justify. It is not readily communicable to healthy persons, even personal contact with a leper not necessarily causing infection unless there be some scratch or wound on the person of the healthy individual into which the virus may enter. Visitors to the Isthmus, who find interest in the spectacle of hopeless human suffering, frequently visit the colony without marked precautions and with no reported case of infection.
To what extent the sanitation system so painstakingly built up by Col. Gorgas and his associates will be continued after the seal “complete” shall be stamped upon the Canal work, and the workers scattered to all parts of the land, is not now determined. Panama and Colon will, of course, be kept up to their present standards, but whether the war against the malarial mosquito will be pursued in the jungle as it is today when the health of 40,000 human beings is dependent upon it is another question. The plan of the army authorities is to abandon the Zone to nature—which presumably includes the anopheles. Whether that plan shall prevail or whether the United States shall maintain it as an object lesson in government, including sanitation, is a matter yet to be determined. In a hearing before a congressional committee in 1913 Col. Gorgas estimated the cost for a system of permanent sanitation for the Zone, including the quarantine, at $90,000 a year. As his total estimates for the years 1913-14 amounted to $524,000, this is indicative of a very decided abandonment of activity in sanitary work.
THE LEPER SETTLEMENT ON PANAMA BAY
At all times during his campaign against the forces of fever and infection Col. Gorgas has had to meet the opposition charge of extravagance and the waste of money. It has been flippantly asserted that it cost him $5 to kill a mosquito—of course an utterly baseless assertion, but one which is readily met by the truth that the bite of a single infected mosquito has more than once cost a life worth many thousand times five dollars. To fix precisely the cost of bringing the Zone to its present state of healthfulness is impossible, because the activities of the sanitary department comprehended many functions in addition to the actual work of sanitation. Col. Gorgas figures that the average expenses of sanitation during the whole construction period were about $365,000 a year and he points out that for the same period Chicago spent $600,000 without any quarantine or mosquito work. The total expenditures for sanitation when the Canal is finished will have amounted to less than one per cent of the cost of that great public work and without this sanitation the Canal could never have been built. That simple statement of fact seems sufficiently to cover the contribution of Col. Gorgas to the work, and to measure the credit he deserves for its completion.