Far More Pressing Is The Protection Of Man Against Their Attacks.
Wonderful Success Has Crowned The Wire-Netting Of The Windows - An
Outcome Of The Classical Experiments Of 1899, In The Roman Campagna.
But chiefest and most urgent of all is the cure of the infected
population.
In this direction, results astonishing - results well-nigh
incredible - have attended the recently introduced governmental sale of
quinine. In the year 1895 there were 16,464 deaths from malaria
throughout Italy. By 1908 the number had sunk to 3463. Eloquent figures,
that require no comment! And, despite the fact that the drug is now sold
at a merely nominal rate or freely given away to the needy - nay, thrust
down the very throats of the afflicted peasantry by devoted gentlemen
who scour the plains with ambulances during the deadly season - despite
this, the yearly profits from its sale are amounting to about
three-quarters of a million francs.
So these forlorn regions are at last beginning to revive.
And returning to Foca, of whose dreadful condition up to 1902 (year of
the introduction of Government quinine) I have just spoken, we find that
a revolution has taken place. Between that year and 1908 the birth-rate
more than doubled the death-rate. In 1908 some two hundred poor folks
frequented the ambulance, nearly six kilogrammes of quinine being
gratuitously distributed; not one of the natives of the place was
attacked by the disease; and there was a single death - an old woman of
eighty, who succumbed to senile decay.
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