That this great waste of life and health and the national economic loss that results can be modified by national action is asserted. Here are to be found the reasons advanced for a great national department of health. The work of this department would be varied. It would include direct work in promoting health on the part of the government, such as administering the food and drug act; aiding the healing and educational agencies, both city and State; obtaining information concerning the cause and prevention of diseases, and disseminating scientifically proved information on all health subjects. It is maintained that the movement for the conservation of health is the most momentous of the conservation movements in this country, and that of all the national wastes which are to be condemned, this waste of health is the gravest. Many startling statements are set forth in the document. Dr. Charles Wardell Stiles, of the United States Public Health and Marine Hospital Services, declares that "The United States is seven times dirtier than Germany and ten times as unclean as Switzerland." He declares that: "Lack of interest in preventive measures against diseases is slaughtering the human race." He takes the position that the real trouble is not so much race suicide as race slaughter, and that it is rather that too many children are allowed to die than that not enough children are born. It is estimated that tuberculosis, a preventable disease, costs the nations $1,000,000,000 annually. Typhoid fever is estimated by Dr. George M. Kober, dean of the medical department of Georgetown University, to cost over $300,000,000 annually. [Page 50] In connection with acute diseases this statement is made: "The loss from tuberculosis has been reduced to half of what it was thirty years ago. Nevertheless, of the 90,000,000 people now living in the United States at least 5,000,000 will be lost through this disease because adequate effort is not made to prevent it. Besides the economic waste through deaths from any disease, the waste through sickness from the same disease is also colossal." Great as are the reductions in the rates of infant mortality by improved milk and water supplies and by educational campaigns, the present rate is still enormous. "If some witch or wizard could conjure up the unnecessary babies' funerals annually occurring in this country it would be found that the little hearses would reach from New York to Chicago. If we should add the mourning mothers and friends, it would make a cortege extending across the continent." While the death rates from acute diseases have been greatly reduced, the rates from chronic diseases have been steadily increasing. Cancer is one of the chronic diseases apparently on the increase.