Man's Mortal Enemies 15 



decided to investigate; and their investigations showed that 

 typhus can be carried by household rats — and probably by 

 other rodents — and that it is transmitted from rat to rat by 

 rat fleas and rat lice. Of course, when a flea carrying the 

 deadly Rickettsiae bites a human, the disease can become es- 

 tablished in man, and if the victim is lousy, he can in turn 

 pass the disease on to those with whom he comes in contaa. 

 Thus, the rat is not only the carrier of plague — he is also a 

 reservoir of typhus. And keeping our bodies free from lice 

 is not sufficient assurance that we will not get typhus. We 

 must also look out for the flea. 



Mosquif-oes and Quinine 



Many Americans who fought the war in the Pacific 

 brought back to their native land millions of unwanted sou- 

 venirs: tiny protozoa in their red blood cells. These organ- 

 isms, the germs of that debilitating disease, malaria, were in- 

 troduced into the bodies of our soldiers by female members 

 of a class of mosquitoes known as Anopheles. However, it 

 is not necessary for a resident of this country to leave the 

 borders of the U. S. A. in order to gQt malaria — the disease is 

 well established in at least 36 of our states and it has been 

 known to exist in most of the others. Although Laveran 

 discovered the protozoa of malaria as early as 1880 and 

 Ronald Ross discovered the role of the mosquito in the trans- 

 mission of the disease in 1895, we have accomplished little 

 in the way of mosquito control, and are still relying on quinine 

 or newer drugs such as atebrin to make life tolerable in re- 

 gions where Anopheles reign. 



Malaria is not a disease, like bubonic plague or typhus, 

 that kills a high percentage of those that it attacks, but it 



