on Mosquito Extermination. 49 



yellow fever, we spent a hundred thousand dollars, outside of 

 the routine sanitary work, on mosquito extermination. Our 

 experience was that the mosquito was entirely local. I w^ould 

 require, on receiving a report that mosquitoes were bad in a 

 particular house, that the inspector locate the cause on the 

 premises. In many instances, it occurred that the inspectors 

 had to be sent back several times, with orders to look more 

 carefully over the premises. I do not think that there was a 

 single instance, in which the mosquitoes were reported as being 

 unusually bad, in which the cause w'as not located on the 

 premises immediately concerned. For the year 1900, the 

 year preceding the beginning of our mosquito work in Havana, 

 we had 325 deaths from malaria. In 1901, the first year of our 

 mosquito work, we reduced this by half, and had 151 deaths from 

 malaria. The second year of mosquito work, we reduced the 

 results of the preceding year again by half, and had yy deaths, 

 and up to the ist of September, 1903, I see from the Havana 

 health reports that they have had but 39 deaths from malaria. 

 This is a very fair measure of the amount of general mosquito 

 work done and of the results obtained from this class of work, 

 because, from the nature of the disease, the malarial patient 

 could not be isolated and followed up, as was the yellow fever 

 case, and therefore no special work could be done toward 

 destroying the malarial infected mosquito. The decrease in 

 the number of malarial cases is entirely due to the decrease 

 in mosquitoes at large. In many parts of Havana, when I 

 left there in October, 1902, mosquitoes had entirely dis- 

 appeared. The inspectors of the various districts made daily 

 reports of the condition of the houses inspected by them, as 

 to whether or not there w^ere mosquito larvce on the premises. 

 These reports were consolidated day by day and month by 

 month, and we could thus keep a pretty close estimate of the 

 results of our work. The consolidated report of January, 1901, 

 just before our mosquito work commenced, showed 26,000 

 water deposits containing mosquito larvse within the city limits. 

 The same consolidated report for the following January showed 

 less than 300 for the same area. 



Dr. Smith has stated here to-day, and given very good 

 evidence in support of his statement, that the culex sollicitans 

 will travel twenty miles or more. This is very interesting 

 and new to me, although not very important as far as the 



