Indians Sick

On the Arizona, New Mexico and Utah plateaux the Navaho Indians constitute a sort of peasantry, crowding into low, flat adobe shacks. Water is scarce and sanitation crude. That explains why so many Navahos have contracted trachoma, highly contagious eye disease. The eyelids become granulated and sticky. The victim squints, often becomes blind. Already one out of every four or five Indians has trachoma. Every third child has it, and at the reservation school at Fort Defiance, Ariz., every other pupil suffers. Aroused, Commissioner Charles H. Burke of the Indian Bureau, Department of the Interior, last week ordered the Fort Defiance school quarantined as an institution to which, after Jan. 1, only diseased children might be sent.