December 7, 1906.] 



SCIENCE. 



745 



drains and £210 for town gardeners. For 

 Port Swettenham the total expenditure to the 

 end of 1905 was £7,000 and the annual cost 

 of keeping up the drains, etc., is approximately 

 £40 for clearing earth drains and £100 for 

 town gardeners. 



The careful tabulation of cases and deaths 

 and of the results of the examination of blood 

 of children in especially drained areas indi- 

 cate the following conclusions: (1) Measures 

 taken systematically to destroy breeding places 

 of mosquitoes in these towns, the inhabitants 

 of which suffered terribly from malaria, were 

 followed almost immediately by a general im- 

 provement in health and decrease in death 

 rate. (2) That this was due directly to the 

 work carried out and not to a general dying 

 out of malaria in the district, is clearly shown 

 by figures pointing out that while malaria has 

 practically ceased to exist in the areas treated 

 it has actually increased to a considerable 

 extent in other parts of the district where anti- 

 malaria measures have not been undertaken. 



The statistics for 1905 are even more favor- 

 able than those for 1902, which gives a very 

 strong evidence in favor of the permanent 

 nature of the improvement carried out. In 

 fact, it seems as though malaria has been 

 permanently stamped out at Klang and Port 

 Swettenham by work undertaken in 1901, and 

 this experience in the Malay States should be 

 of value to those responsible for the health of 

 communities similarly situated in many other 

 parts of the world. 



Another striking example of excellent work 

 of this kind is found in the recently published 

 report on the suppression of malaria in Is- 

 mailia, issued under the auspices of the Com- 

 pagnie Universelle du Canal Maritime de 

 Suez. Ismalia is now a town of 8,000 inhabit- 

 ants. It was founded by DeLesseps in April, 

 1862, on the borders of Lake Timsah, which 

 the Suez Canal crosses at mid-distance be- 

 tween the Red Sea and the Mediterranean. 

 Malarial fever made its appearance in very 

 severe form in September, 1877, although the 

 city had up to that time been very healthy, 

 and increased so that since 1886 almost all 

 of the inhabitants have suffered from the 

 fever. In 1901 an attempt to control the dis- 



ease was made on the mosquito basis, and 

 this attempt rapidly and completely succeeded, 

 and after two years of work all traces of 

 malaria disappeared from the city. The work 

 was directed not only against anopheles mos- 

 quitoes, but against other culicids, and com- 

 prised the drainage of a large swamp and the 

 other usual measures. The initial expense 

 amounted to 50,000 francs, and the annual 

 expenses since have amounted to about 18,300 

 francs. 



The results may be summarized about as 

 follows: Since the beginning of 1903 the 

 ordinary mosquitoes have disappeared from 

 Ismailia. Since the autumn of 1903 not a 

 single larva of anopheles has been found in 

 the protected zone, which extends to the west 

 for a distance of one thousand meters from 

 the first houses in the Arabian quarter and to 

 the east for a distance of 1,800 meters from 

 the first houses in the European quarter. 

 After 1902 malarial fever obviously began to 

 decrease, and since 1903 not a single new case 

 of malaria has been found in Ismailia. 



Last May Dr. Ronald Ross, of the Liver- 

 pool School of Tropical Medicine, to whom 

 the writer is indebted for information con- 

 cerning these instances just cited, was asked 

 by the Lake Kopais Company in Greece to 

 make a study of the malaria which has long 

 been prevalent on their estates in that part 

 of Greece. He made the trip and carried out 

 the investigation which revealed an unexpect- 

 edly high degree of malarial infection in most 

 of the localities examined. He also learned 

 from members of the Grecian Anti-malaria 

 League that the district of Kopais is by no 

 means exceptional in this respect, and that 

 malaria is very prevalent in many rural areas 

 throughout the country. 



As an example of the conditions. Dr. Ross 

 found that in the village of Moulki, near the 

 ancient Heliartos on the Kopaic Plain, of 

 eighty persons examined, in thirty-eight there 

 was an enlargement of the spleen^ — nearly fifty 

 per cent.; at the village of Mazi he found it 

 in thirteen cases out of forty; at Skripou (the 

 ancient Orchomenos) it occurred in twenty- 

 five out of fifty school children — exactly fifty 

 per cent. He suggests the query as to how 



