Here the trails of the extermination party fork, one of them taking the
perfectly obvious but rather troublesome direction of protecting houses
and particularly bedrooms with suitable screens and keeping the
inhabitants safely behind them from about an hour before sundown on. By
this simple method alone, parties of explorers, of campers, of
railroad-builders going through swamps, of the laborers on our Panama
Canal, have been enabled to live for weeks and months in the most
malarious regions with perfect impunity, so long as these precautions
were strictly observed. The first experiment of this sort was carried
out by Bignami upon a group of laborers in the famous, or rather
infamous, Roman Campagna, whose deadly malarial fevers have a classic
reputation, and has achieved its latest triumphs in the superb success
of Colonel Gorgas at Panama. While this procedure should never be
neglected, it is obvious that it involves a good deal of irksome
confinement and interferes with freedom of movement, and it will
probably be carried out completely only under military or official
discipline, or in tropical regions where the risks are so great that its
observance is literally a matter of life or death.
The other division of malaria-hunters pursued the trail of the
_Anopheles_ to her lair. There they discovered facts which give us
practically the whip-hand over malarial and other tropical fevers
whenever we choose to exercise it. It had long been known that the
breeding-place of mosquitoes was in water; that their eggs when
deposited in water floated upon the surface like tiny boats, usually
glued together into a raft; that they then turned into larvae, of which
the well-known "wigglers" in the water-butt or the rain-barrel are
familiar examples; and that they finally hatched into the complete
insect and rose into the air.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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