TUBERCULOSIS IN RELATION TO ANIMAL 

 INDUSTRY AND PUBLIC HEALTH. 



ITS PREVALENCE AND RELATIVE IMPORTANCE. 



Tuberculosis is so extensively prevalent and proves such a 

 veritable scourge throughout the civilized world that no disease 

 is so deserving of close and accurate study, or of the enforcement 

 of eflfective measures for its suppression. Cholera, yellow fever 

 and small pox, which occasionally invade our territory, creating 

 universal terror and dismay, claim but few victims as compared 

 with this ever-present, universally devastating plague. These 

 other plagues are quick, severe and fatal, it is true, but for this 

 very reason they can be promptly recognized, and checked and 

 even stamped out, whereas tuberculosis is equivocal and under- 

 hand in its method, slow and uncertain in its progress, and on 

 this account escapes recognition and proves by far the most 

 deadly of any single disease attacking the human family. The 

 average ratio of deaths from tuberculosis to the total mortality is 

 14 per cent., or one death in every eight, while under special con- 

 ditions it rises to one in three, as in the Marquesas Islands, or 

 even one in two, as in some of our Indian reservations. Tuber- 

 culosis may be classed with "the pestilence that walketh in 

 darkness, "while the the three other diseases named are like " the 

 destruction that wasteth at noonday." But the deaths from tuber- 

 culosis being constant and uniform, people accept them as inevi- 

 table and fold their idle hands with true Mohamedan fatalism 

 instead of boldly exposing the hidden deathtrap, and cutting 

 short its destructive work. 



If the 5,490 deaths from tuberculosis which occur every year in 

 the city of New York could be brought together in an epidemic 

 lasting but one week, no small pox, cholera nor yellow fever 

 scare would approach the panic which would thus be created, for 



