in attacking us. But here, as in
dealing with evils that originate with human beings, an ounce of
prevention is worth a ton of cure. The most effectual way to eliminate
germ diseases is to remove the cause--the food supply of disease germs.
The fact that many germs are plants, not animals, does not weaken the
analogy, for weeds do not get a chance in well-tilled soil.

Perhaps the most notable recent example of government germ
extermination is the triumph over the yellow-fever and malaria mosquito
in Panama. When the French started to build a canal in Panama, the
first thing they did was to build a hospital. The hospital was always
full and the canal was given up. At the time the United States proposed
to re-attempt the work, it was thought that it could not be done
without great loss of life and without great labor difficulties.
Instead of taking the sickness for granted and enlarging the French
hospital, the chief medical inspector, Gorgas, took for granted that
there need be no unusual sickness if proper preventive measures were
taken. He knew what the French had not known, that the yellow-fever
scourge depends for its terrors upon mosquitoes. Accordingly, with the
aid of six thousand men and five million dollars he set about to
starve out the few infected and infectious kinds of mosquito,--the
yellow-fever or house mosquito and the malaria or meadow mosquito. He
introduced waterworks and hydrants, paved the streets, drained the
swamps and pools in which they breed, and instituted a weekly
house-to-house inspection to prevent even so much as a pail of stagnant
water offering harbor to these enemies. The grass of the meadows where
the malaria mosquito breeds was cut short and kept short within three
hundred feet of dwellers,--as far as the mosquito can fly. All ditches
were disinfected with paraffin, and the natives were forced to observe
sanitary laws. President Roosevelt, in his special message to Congress
on the Panama Canal in 1906, stated that in the weekly house-to-house
visit of the inspectors at the time he was in Panama but two mosquitoes
were found. These were not of the dangerous type. As a consequence of
this sanitary engineering there is very little sickness in Panama, the
hospital is seldom one third full, and the canal is progressing very
much faster than was expected. Panama, like Havana, is now safer than
many American cities, because cleaner and less hospitable to disease
germs.

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