IMPORTANCE OF PARASITIC DISEASES 3 



A decade or two ago a child's reader contained the following 

 lines : 



" Baby Bye, 

 Here's a fly; 



We will catch him, you and I. 

 How he crawls 

 Up the walls, 

 Yet he never falls! 

 I believe with six such legs 

 You and I could walk on eggs. 

 There he goes 

 On his toes, 

 Tickling Baby's nose." 



What a contrast to this attitude toward the housefly are our 

 present-day fly-swatting campaigns, our crusades against possible 

 breeding places of flies, and our education of the public by slogans, 

 placards, lectures, magazine articles and books regarding the 

 filthy habits and disease-carrying propensities of this selfsame 

 housefly! 



But let us not think for a moment that the battle is won. Not 

 only are there some diseases which still baffle our attempts to 

 cure them or to control them, or even to understand their nature, 

 but those which we already know how to control are by no 

 means subdued. Plague continues to take a toll of life in India 

 amounting to at least several hundreds of thousands a year; 

 malaria even today destroys directly or indirectly millions of 

 people every year and more or less completely incapacitates 

 many millions more; syphilis is yet one of the principal causes 

 of insanity, paralysis, still-births and barrenness in the civilized 

 world, and is estimated to exist in 10 per cent of the population 

 of the United States, i.e., in about 10,000,000 people; hook- 

 worms still infect and render more or less imperfect over half a 

 billion people in the world ; — and these are all diseases the causes 

 of which are known, the means of transmission recognized, 

 methods of prevention understood, and the cure of which, with 

 the exception of plague, is entirel}^ possible. 



It is evident that the crying need of the present time is not 

 so much additions to our knowledge of the cause, control and 

 prevention of diseases, much as this is to be hoped for, as it is 



