RAT PROOFING AS AN ANTIPLAGUE MEASURE. 



By Richard H. Creel, 

 Passed Assistant Surgeon, United States Public Health and Marine- Hospital Service. 



To appreciate the great importance and absolute necessity of rat 

 proofing as an antiplague measure, it is only necessary to consider 

 the results that have followed its use as compared with other measures 

 that have been relied on in recent years in combating this disease. 

 These were, briefly, disinfection, evacuation, or destruction of build- 

 ings in infected areas, preventive inoculations, and destruction of 

 rats either by poison or by trapping. 



Plague was formerly believed to be communicable by aerial trans- 

 mission and through the agency of fomites. Sanitarians have, 

 therefore, put great faith in disinfection procedures, but the results 

 have never been satisfactory, and it is only necessary to consider 

 the method of transmission of plague to perceive the fatuity of bac- 

 tericidal measures. Measures intended for the destruction of fleas 

 are also of relatively small value. It is well worth while to destroy 

 all fleas possible, but if those infesting the rat population escape, the 

 efforts will have had little effect in preventing the spread of plague. 

 It is only those fleas that infest rats and their habitats that are of 

 importance in relation to the transmission of disease, and it is only 

 by rat proofing that their destruction in rat burrows and runs can be 

 accomplished. 



Rat-proofing of individual buildings is of no recent date, but new 

 emphasis was laid on rat-proofing as a separate and distinct anti- 

 plague measure by Passed Assistant Surgeon Mark J. White in an 

 article written in the fall of 1907." 



Disinfecting procedures must be regarded as of minor importance 

 in plague prevention, except in pneumonic cases where its use is 

 imperative. It is not intended to depreciate the value of disinfec- 

 tion, but rather to estimate its exact value as an antipest measure. 

 Time and money should not be wasted nor a feeling of false security 

 engendered by using an ineffective measure when others, as rat proof- 



« Journal American Medical Association October 19, 1907. 

 (171) 



