Medicine Looks Ahead 259 



calls for a proper mode of living, which means that faulty diet 

 must be corrected and excesses of work and play avoided. 

 The direct treatment of old age, he says, calls for the specific 

 use of vitamins and hormones to aid deficient organs. The 

 hormones are "chemical messengers" which mysteriously reg- 

 ulate the functioning of our bodies and minds. 



Air Age Problems 



"No place on earth will be more than 48 hours from your 

 local airport" in the postwar world. This statement sums up 

 the tremendous distance-annihilating achievement of the air- 

 plane. But it also tells public-health authorities to prepare for 

 trouble. Because of air transport, dangerous diseases in a far- 

 away part of the world can be carried to the United States 

 overnight. At this moment four hundred uniformed quaran- 

 tine officers and sanitary inspectors of the Public Health Serv- 

 ice are standing guard at airports where planes from overseas 

 come in. They see to it that planes, which already have been 

 sprayed with a chemical lethal to mosquitoes, are sprayed 

 again. Passengers are given medical examinations. Those with 

 malaria are permitted to enter the country but they must go 

 straight to hospitals and stay there until they are no longer 

 sources of infection. 



"Unbelievably rapid air transportation makes the problem 

 of disease control of transcending importance," writes Hiram 

 Blauvelt in the New York Herald Tribune, "and with the 

 war's end it will be further aggravated when thousands of 

 soldiers swarm back into the United States ideal 'carriers' 

 for every type of tropical disease and rare malady heretofore 

 alien to this country. 



"Immunization will go a long way towards protecting the 

 populations of the world, whether at home or traveling, from 

 many of the dread diseases. But the real solution will come," 



