CONTROL OF BACTERIAL DISEASES 233 



idea. 1 Ignorance aside, there is no more reason for allowing 

 ourselves to be bitten by bacteria than by rattlesnakes. 

 About two people die from snake venom annually in the 

 United States; 20,000 die yearly in India from snake bite, 

 because cobras are accorded superstitious protection. We 

 religiously preserve our bacteria, with the filth in which they 

 thrive and the flies that distribute them ; the Hindus, their 

 relatively harmless snakes. 



A few of the more familiar germs, with the disease and 

 death they are causing, are presented in the table on page 234. 

 When we all know how to kill and avoid these bacteria, as 

 well as we know how to deal with rattlesnakes, we may be 

 as free from them as we are from the snakes. All must 

 know and each must do his part, for one ignorant person 

 can scatter bacteria by the million from Maine to California. 



The table is by no means complete. In the next chapter we shall 

 study a similar list of diseases caused by parasites of animal origin. 

 There is another list, known to be infections, smallpox, yellow 

 fever, scarlet fever, measles, spotted fever, and foot-and-mouth disease, 

 the specific causes of which have baffled all attempts to discover. 

 Still another class of ailments, noninfectious, chronic and organic, 

 of the heart and arteries, brain and kidneys, of heavy and increasing 

 fatality, may have to do with organs weakened by parasitic attack. 

 Finally, we have no statistics of the number of the wounded, the 

 weakened or crippled, and the number of minor ailments, very numer- 

 ous and of constant occurrence, that impose their burdens of sheer 

 misery the millions of cases of rheumatism, tonsillitis, boils, felons, 

 carious teeth and toothache, indigestions, diarrheas and dysenteries, 

 and "colds," most wretched of all, probably not less than 200,000,"000 

 of them a year. When we add to all this the bacterial diseases of 

 animals (hog and fowl choleras, bovine, avian, and other tuberculoses 

 and pneumonias, white diarrhea of chicks and foul brood of bees, 



1 "Neither regularity of life nor bodily strength was any preservation 

 against it. The strong and the weak were equally struck down ; and death 

 spared not those of whom care was taken, any more than the poor, desti- 

 tute of all help." (The fleas of that time bit all alike.) GASQUKT, "The 

 Black Death," p. 12 



