Fighting Infantile /Paralysis 



NF.W YORK CITY has 

 liccn hghliiiy an epi- 

 demic of infantile 

 paralysis. More than two 

 thousand five hundred 

 have contracted the disease 

 and six hundred have died. 

 Health authorities of nation, 

 state and city assisted by 

 eminent specialists in chil- 

 dren's diseases, including Dr. 

 Simon Flexner, head of the 

 Rockefeller Institute, and Dr. 

 Noguchi, the Japanese special- 

 ist, have joined forces in 

 fighting the scourge, which, 

 for the last twenty-five years, 

 has baffled the medical pro- 

 fession. 



The disease has been con- 

 fined largely to the New York 

 district, although a score of 

 other states have reported 

 child victims. The pan 

 played by the metropolis to 

 keep down the death rate and 

 to clean up everj^ possible 

 spot that might breed germs 

 of infection has been instruc- 

 tive. Every department of the municipal 

 government is co-operating with the 

 Mayor, the Red Cross, the city's 

 physicians, an army of nurses in addition, 

 and federal auth(jrities. Health Com- 

 missioner Emerson has called out New 

 York's one thousand "home guards" — 

 citizens trained under police direction for 

 public dut\' in time of crisis— to join in 

 the. crusade. 



The motion-j)icture theaters have been 

 barred against children, as have the 

 public playgrounds and recreation piers. 

 One of the large film companies has 

 issued fifty prints of a special release on 

 the subject which will be exhibited in all 

 the theaters and on motor-trucks equip- 

 ped with translucent screens. A lecturer 

 from the New York Board of Health 

 accompanies each of the trucks and 

 lectures to parents as the film pictures 

 are projected on the screen. .At first, 

 when the plague was confined to New 

 York City, the film company planned to 

 give the illustratetl lectures only in local 



districts but this ]jlan has 

 been altered and the prints 

 are being sent all over, even 

 to Melbourne, Australia, 

 where the theaters have been 

 (Kjsed because of the epidemic 

 there too. As a precautionary* 

 measure the New York City 

 Health Department has its 

 nurses making house-to-house 

 can\'asses. Other acts of 

 pre\ention are the nightly 

 washing of streets in the 

 infected districts, the exclu- 

 sion of all household pets from 

 sick rooms, careful screening 

 from flies and insistence upon 

 the utmost cleanliness. 



It is the belief that the 

 disease was introduced from 

 Southern Italy by im- 

 migrants fleeing from 

 the war zone. The 

 first cases reported in 

 New York City were 

 in an Italian section 

 near the Brooklyn 

 waterfront, where .the 

 epidemic of 1907 first 

 appeared. Then the mortality was ap- 

 pro.ximately five per cent; the present 

 rate is about twenty per cent. In 1907 

 the victims numbered two thousand five 

 hundred. 



What makes the situation the more 

 serious is the fact that medical science 

 does not know how the disease is carried. 

 In scarcely one case out of eight hundred 

 has it been po.ssible to trace the source 

 of infection. .A few years ago it was 

 announced that the stable fly transmit- 

 ted the malady. But in Buffalo, during 

 an epidemic, this theory was disproved 

 when districts thick with flies were 

 comparatively free from the disease. 



Formerly extreme dr\'ness and heat 

 were given as a cause. However, the 

 Buffahj plague occurred during an un- 

 usually wet summer. In an epidemic on 

 the Pacific Coast it was discovered thai 

 coincitlentally there was an outbreak oi 

 lame colts. The two could not be 

 connected, however. Deputy Surgeon 

 W. C. Rucker of the I'nited States 



He Has Heard That His 

 Safety Depends Upon 

 Keeping His Surroundings 

 Clean and He Looks as 

 if He Means to Do It 



399 



