WAR AGAINST MALARIA.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXI, Issue 18891, 13 December 1924, Page 2 (Supplement)

WAR AGAINST MALARIA.

100,000 LIVES SAVED.

BEATING THE MOSQUITO.

WORK IN MALAY STATES.

In ilio Malay States a wise doctor, Sir Malcolm Watson, and »ii.-> fellowworkers have lifted tho curse of malaria that has brooded over the hill country ever since the land was tilled there. In ten years this wise man has saved a hundred thousand lives.

Up in the hills and down to Singapore, everyone was horn to malaria. The mosquito waited on every child from its birth upwards, waiting to plunge its poisoned needle into the flesh. The poison on tho mosquito's needle, as Sir Ronald Ross showed years ago, was tho deadly parasite which", living "half its time in the mosquito and half in man, makes men sick unto death with malaria. Malaria is a poisoning of the blood. Sir Ronald Ross showed that if all the mosquitoes could be destroyed the parasite, must be extinguished, because for haH its life it would have nowhere to live. That is the knowledge which has enabled Sir Malcolm Watson to suppress malaria in tho hill districts, just as it enabled Colonel Gorgas to stamp it out in the Panama Canal zone.

On a ship going through the Canal passengers can now sleep without mosquito curtains. That is because all mosquitoes

One of their homes was the disused to-mato-tin half filled with rainwater, but anyone who leaves that sort of thing lying about now is fined £5.

Sir Malcolm Watson cannot fine the natives of the Malay States £5 for helping the mosquito to live, but he did show the owners of cultivated lands that the mosquitoes lived in the running water coursing through the estates. So he persuaded them to cover up the drainage channels. That was fatal for the mosquitoes, and their population has fallen year by year. So has the death rate from malaria: so have the malaria cases, wHich in one hill district have fallen from 6000 to 10. In Singapore 35,000 lives have been saved in ten years.