FILARIASIS 



287 



agents of yellow fever are in the water-butt and 

 the broken bottles and old sardine-tins. Science 

 has given the word, and now there are Anopheles 

 brigades and Culex brigades set going ; labourers 

 with brooms and rubbish-carts, sweeping-out the 

 stagnant pools, draining the surface soil, and 

 carrying off the odd receptacles that serve to hold 

 mosquito eggs and larvae. The job, like all sanitary 

 jobs, must be steady, year in year out : it must be 

 limited to infected places, a whole continent cannot 

 be treated. But there the work is, and will grow ; 

 and saves, by unskilled labour, and at a trivial 

 expense, those "non-acclimatised" lives that have 

 hitherto been thrown away as recklessly as the 

 larvae that are now swept out of the puddles and 

 ditches round African settlements. 



A recent report of great interest, from Barba- 

 does, has been published in the British Medical 

 Journal for 14th June 1902. It is written by Dr 

 Low, whose experiment on himself in the Campagna 

 has already been noted in this chapter. Dr Low 

 reports that there is no indigenous malaria in the 

 island, and that neither he nor Mr Lefroy could 

 find a single Anopheles larva, though they hunted 

 diligently in the swamps and other likely places. 

 But filariasis is terribly ccmmon, and so is Culex 

 fatigans. Dr Low examined the night-blood of 

 600 cases of all kinds in the General Hospital, the 

 Central Almshouse, and elsewhere, and found the 

 filaria-embryos in no less than 76 == 12.66 per cent. 

 He caught and dissected a hundred mosquitoes 

 {Culex fatigans) from the wards and corridors of 



