Page:Tropical Diseases.djvu/310

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270
YELLOW FEVER
[CHAP.

sion, in a thirteen days' quarantine camp. Mean-while the infected area must be rigidly isolated and its mosquitoes destroyed. In this way the spread of the disease will be prevented.

In the event of yellow fever breaking out in the crew of a man-of-war, the cases, if possible, should be sent ashore, and the ship hurried north or south into cold weather, any mosquitoes which may have found their way on board being at once destroyed.

In the case of the appearance of yellow fever in a large town, the method which was so successfully adopted by Surgeon-General Gorgas, U.S.A., must be adopted. Funds and authority must be obtained at once. An efficient and adequate sanitary staff must be promptly organized and instructed in their duties. Cases of every kind of fever as well as cases of yellow fever should be immediately reported, and the patients promptly protected from mosquito bite by wire screens. At the same time the systematic destruction of mosquitoes in their breeding-places and in the patients' and neighbouring houses must be rigidly enforced. The infected houses should be carefully sealed up by pasting paper over all the doors, windows, ventilators, chimneys, and cracks, and the fumes of pyrethrum or of burning sulphur— 2 Ib. per 1,000 cubic feet of space— or other insecticide employed to stupefy the insects, which should afterwards be swept up and burned. In this way, in 1901, yellow fever was stamped out in ninety days in Havana, a city where for a period of 140 years it had held uninterrupted sway. In this way, in 1905, New Orleans was freed from the disease in a much shorter period than in any previous epidemic; and in this way Gorgas has made the line of the Panama Canal as healthy as New York. Similar results from similar measures are being obtained in the larger Brazilian ports.

Guiteras has shown, in a practical manner, that yellow-fever patients may be admitted to the wards of a general hospital or be nursed in private houses with impunity, provided they are protected by