Too Much Smallpox

Surgeon General Hugh Smith Gumming of the Public Health Service, who guards the health of the nation's 120,000,000 people, made his annual accounting to Congress last week.

Smallpox, plague, yellow fever, cholera and typhus are prevalent in various parts of the world. Ships, immigrants, animals (especially rats) may bring the pests into the U. S. Dr. Cumming's small brigade of doctors, dentists, sanitarians, pharmacists, nurses and specialists inspected 21,631 ships, more than 2,000,000 passengers, more than 2,000,000 seamen at domestic, insular and foreign ports. Result: only seven cases of smallpox, one of leprosy and two of typhus reached U. S. quarantine.

Neither here nor abroad were there any pandemic outbreaks of disease last year, and in no country with a modern public health organization did pestilences spread. India continues to harbor bubonic plague, as do French Indo-China, China, Algeria, Madagascar, Nigeria, Siam, Argentina, Ecuador, South Africa, Greece, Russia. Two people in California, however, caught bubonic plague last year--from ground squirrels.

Persons traveling to Siam, Cochin-China, China, and Iraq must still beware cholera; along West Africa yellow fever; in backward Europe typhus; everywhere smallpox.

The U. S. had more smallpox than any other country of the world, except India. This situation irritates Dr. Cumming, an habitually serene Virginian. Chidingly he wrote to Congress:

"It is difficult to understand why this condition is allowed to continue year after year. A large percentage of the property in this country is insured against loss by fire, and a man who fails to provide for his family by taking out life insurance is censured; yet, when smallpox is introduced into a community in the United States it usually finds many victims who have never been vaccinated and others who have not been vaccinated for many years. Nearly 34,000 cases of smallpox in the United States in the calendar year 1927 testify to the neglect of the people to utilize vaccination, the known means of preventing the disease."

Each year Dr. Cumming, who has been in the Public Health Service for more than 30 years and its surgeon general since Woodrow Wilson appointed him so in 1920, calls the health officers of all the states to a conference. Most of them attend and from his quiet, pointed talks get stamina to suppress disease within their districts. But six or seven states are so careless of their epidemiological work that their statistics are rarely considered in Dr. Cumming's survey of the nation's health. In the two score and more who habitually report, last year there were 4,000 needless deaths from measles, 7,000 from whooping cough. Infantile paralysis was a scourge chiefly because its prodromal symptoms are ignored and its after-effects ignorantly fought.

Dr. Cumming made a special point of telling Congress about the fundamental research the Public Health Service is making in various diseases--cancer, tuberculosis, goiter, leprosy, trachoma, undulant fever, typhus fever, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, pneumonia, venereal diseases.

Most Congressmen know Dr. Cumming personally. Few men are better known in Washington. When a telephone rings, and his soft voice asks something for his Public Health Service, he gets that something very quickly.