CHAPTER III 



THE FEVER CENSUS 



WHEN public money is spent on any municipal im- 

 provement, after a time people are inclined to ask : 

 What are the results ? This is also the case with 

 health measures. Unless the state of health of the 

 town is known before the sanitary reform is begun, 

 it will be impossible to obtain comparative statistics, 

 and there will be no means of showing what the 

 results are. This may cause those responsible for 

 instituting the reforms to render themselves liable to 

 deserved criticism. Statistical results are always 

 expected, and every effort should be made to obtain 

 them. Unless inquiries are made before the reform 

 is started it is very difficult to obtain correct figures 

 afterwards and statistics, to be of any value, must 

 be comparable. It is most important that any 

 figures obtained at the outset of an anti-mosquito 

 campaign should be checked regularly and periodic- 

 ally with those obtained during its progress, and 

 compared with them, and corrected so that the 

 methods employed may be modified or improved 

 whenever necessary or practicable. In this way only 

 will it be possible to state, as numerical facts, the 



