310 IMPROVEMENT OF MAN'S ENVIRONMENT 



cent age of them are cured. In this way and by laws which re- 

 quire proper air shafts and window ventilation in tenement houses, 

 by laws against spitting in public places, and in other ways, the 

 boards of health in our towns and cities are waging war on tuber- 

 culosis. 

 Theodore Roosevelt said, in one of his messages to Congress : 



" There are about 3,000,000 people seriously ill in the United States, of 

 whom 500,000 are consumptives. More than half of this illness is preventable. 

 If we count the value of each life lost at only $1700 and reckon the average 

 earning lost by illness at $700 a year for grown men, we find that the economic 

 gain from mitigation of preventable disease in the United States would exceed 

 $1,500,000,000 a year. This gain can be had through medical investigation 

 and practice, school and factory hygiene, restriction of labor by women and 

 children, the education of the people in both publid and private hygiene, and 

 through improving the efficiency of our health service, municipal, state, and 

 national." 



Work of the Division of School and Infant Hygiene. — Besides 

 the division of communicable diseases, the division of sanitation, 

 which regulates the general sanitary conditions of houses and their 

 surroundings, and the division of inspection, which looks after the 

 purity and conditions of sale and delivery of milk and foods, there 

 is another division which most vitally concerns school children. 

 This is the division of school and infant hygiene, which supervises 

 the care of the children of the city. 



Adenoids. — Many children suffer needlessly from enlarged 

 tonsils and ad'enoids, — growths in the back of the nose or mouth 

 which prevent admission of sufficient air to the lungs. A child 

 suffering from these growths is usually a ^^ mouth breather." The 

 result to the child may be deafness, chronic running of the nose, 

 nervousness, and lack of power to think. His body cells are 

 starving for oxygen. A very simple operation removes this 

 growth. Cooperation on the part of the children and parents with 

 the doctors or nurses of the board of health will do much in removing 

 this handicap from many young lives. 



Eyestrain. — Another handicap to a boy or a girl is eyestrain. 

 Twenty-two per cent of the school children of Massachusetts 

 were recently found to have defects in vision. Tests for defective 

 eyesight may be made at school easily by competent doctors, and 



