Proceedings of Sixth Annual Meeting * 77 



Mosquito Control In Military Camps 



BY RUSSELL W. GIES, M.SC. CAPTAIN IN THE SANITARY 

 CORPS OF THE U. S. ARMY. 



All I can say this afternoon will be of a general character. First, 

 the problem that the War Department had, when the war broke 

 out; second, the methods that were taken to meet this problem; 

 third, just in general, the results that have been obtained in getting 

 rid of malaria, for, as you probably know, the prevention of malaria 

 has been the main object in the control of mosquitoes. 



The malaria problem, as Mr. Le Prince pointed out last night, 

 has been a serious one. Back in the Civil War about fifty-two per 

 cent of the white troops that were engaged in the war were taken 

 sick with malaria, and about eighty-three per cent of the colored 

 troops. In the Spanish-American War the malaria admission rate 

 to the hospitals ran up as high as six hundred and ninety-seven per 

 thousand each year. 



The bulk of the camps have been in the South. Probably 75 per 

 cent of the men have been trained in more or less malarial dis- 

 tricts. The United States Public Health Service has found by 

 means of blood smears that about six out of every hundred people 

 in the cantonment regions had the malaria parasite in their blood. 

 Now it is impossible, of course, to say how many soldiers coming 

 into the camps have had the malarial plasmodium in their blood ; 

 how many, in other words, were carriers and if bit by Anopheles 

 mosquitoes would have been able to transmit malaria to uninfected 

 northern men going down for training into southern camps. And 

 even if we consider that only one or two per cent of the southerners 

 who came into the camps with malarial plasmodium in their blood, 

 were capable of transmitting malaria, you can see what a serious 

 condition it would be. If many thousands of soldiers were sent 

 abroad with the malarial plasmodium in their blood, when they 

 reached France, England, Italy, or any of the other war theatres, 

 they would have been capable of transmitting malaria to soldiers 

 w^ho were concentrated there from all over the world. 



Soon after the mobilization of troops began, a Sanitary Corps 

 detachment was organized in each of the thirty-two large canton- 

 ments that were scattered throughout the country. One of the 

 duties of the Sanitary Corps was to control mosquito breeding, 



