Rockefeller

Country air is better than city. But city sanitation is better than country.

The Rockefeller Foundation announced that the result of recent work showed that hookworms and, to some extent, malaria and typhoid are rural diseases. "Attempts to control these maladies," said President George E. Vincent in his report, "have disclosed seriously backward health conditions in the American countryside . . . not due to causes inherent in rural life, but to a failure to extend to the open country the kind of sanitary and health services which have been developed in towns and cities." President Vincent also reported for 1923:

A total of $8,431,075 spent on public health and medical education.

Malaria investigations in the U. S., Brazil, Nicaragua, Palestine, the Philippine Islands, Salvador and Porto Rico "offered additional proof that under ordinary conditions many communities can reduce malaria to an almost negligible point, at per capita costs which are within the limits of local taxation."

Hookworm work was carried on during the year in Jamaica, Leeward Islands, Saint Lucia, Trinidad, Porto Rico, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Salvador, Colombia, Dutch Guiana, Brazil, Australia, Fiji, Siam, Ceylon, Mainland India, Mauritius.

Yellow Fever. Dr. Noguchi was sent to Brazil and there conducted a fight against yellow fever (he discovered its organism). Similar work was done in Peru, Ecuador, Central America and Mexico, President Vincent said, with the result that in 1923 no cases of the disease were reported in Mexico, Central America, Ecuador or Peru; an outbreak in Colombia was put under observation; control measures were under way in Northern Brazil and workers were in training to resume study of the disease along the coast of West Africa.