Page:Panama-past-present-Bishop.djvu/185

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The Isthmus Made Healthy
165

fortunates had no claim on our charity, our government at once built a modern insane asylum, first at Miraflores, and later at the Ancon hospital, and moved the lepers to a very beautiful little settlement called Palo Seco. There they are so well cared for that one man, whom our army doctors cured of a slight case of the disease, begged to be allowed to stay in that place for the rest of his life, and was made a hospital orderly there.

Driven out of the two cities, the harried Stegomyia found no refuge in the Canal Zone. There Dr. Gorgas's men cut down hundreds of acres of sheltering brush and high grass, dug miles of drainage ditches and covered all undrained pools and swamps with heavy oil that killed the mosquito larvae whenever they came to the surface to breathe. Holes were blown in old French dump-cars to keep them from holding water. To throw an empty tin can where it might become a breeding-place for mosquitoes was made a finable offense.

The epidemic of 1905 came to an end in September and the panic stopped with it. The last case of yellow fever on the Isthmus was in November, 1906. To-day, the Stegomyia mosquito is virtually extinct there, and so long as it is kept down and all foreign cases of the disease kept out, there will never be any more danger of an epidemic of yellow fever at Panama than at the North Pole. There is still a certain amount of "Chagres fever," which is nothing more or less than malaria. For the Anopheles mosquito, that carries the germ of this disease—a fact discovered by Dr. Ronald Ross of the British Army, in India in 1898—is a much stronger and hardier insect than the Stegomyia, and it is almost im-