Rare Periodicals

Why let malaria put you “in the red”? – Kill it out!

Media

Part of The American Chamber of Commerce Journal

Title

Why let malaria put you “in the red”? – Kill it out!

Language

English

Year

1928

Rights

Fulltext

12 THE AMERICAN CHAMBER OF COMMERCE JOURNAL April, 1928 Why Let Malaria Put You “In the Red”?—Kill It Out! Tropics’ Salvation Found: Anopheles Minimus Tracked and Killed Like Forest Game I Much as we ordinarily disesteem the style of Arthur Brisbane, the Hearst editorial leader writer, for this particular article the Journal will adopt it because of its usefulness in driving home obvious facts with a peculiar force. Thus taking our position on the housetops, let us shout to the Philippine universe: Don’t tolerate mala­ ria. Wipe it out. Sweep your engineering or your plantation project clear of it. For this is what you can do, thanks to six years of probing and demonstration by experts of the Rockefeller Foundation in cooperation with the Philippine health service and a limited group of industrial managers in the provinces. This ought to be front-page telegraph news. The reason it is not is because this particular victory of science is not spectacular. But its portent is arresting—the proximate emancipa­ tion of the tropics. From immemorial times malaria has been the scourge of tropical and near tropical and semitemperate climes. We may suppose that mala­ ria, rather than cholera or any other plague, was the malady that attacked the Khmers and gave their kingdom in upper Cambodia the coup de grace. The most glorious efforts of man have, in short, been repeatedly vanquished by malaria: whole nations, whole peoples, mayhap, have been easily subjugated by foreign arms, after long periods of constant enervation by malaria. The sinister poison has turned, before our very eyes, in history, the triumphal banquets of the Portuguese in Goa into the lentils and soup of degenerate modern Macao. If— They say the lion and the lizard keep The courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep, And Bahram, that great hunter, the wild ass Stamps o’er his head, but cannot break his sleep— —it is perhaps for no other reason than that of pernicious malaria; as to the same source, no doubt, may be traced the psychological morbidity and resistless mysticism of the East generally. Behold the fecundity of the tropics! Useful plant species without number, a dead or dormant season unknown in the calendar year. And then behold their comparative unimportance, their helpless clinging to the lowest rungs of human advancement. Then delve in the lore of science for explanations of this phenomenon. It is not the climate, in itself not enervating; cooler hours of the day may be chosen for quite as much work as men do elsewhere; and in the midst of abun­ dant natural materials, the choicest the world knows, dwell half-awake populations whose dexterity in the crafts is nothing less than as­ tounding. One thing alone explains the cloying lassitude—malaria. Vanquish malaria, and recreate the world. Telephone 2-21-86 A. A. U. FIRE-MARINE-LIFE-AUTOMOBILE INSURANCE CENTRAL AGENTS AND ATTORNEYS: United States Fire Insurance Company of New York Agricultural Insurance Company of Watertown, N. Y. Hudson Insurance Company of New York North River Insurance Company National Union Fire Insurance Company of Pittsburg, Pa. National Union Indemnity Company of Pittsburg, Pa. Asia Life Insurance Company of Wilmington, Delaware AMERICAN ASIATIC UNDERWRITERS, INC. Annually during the past five years, and the record is actually better than that of previous years, malaria has caused 25,000 deaths in the Philippines, deaths which were the direct result of the disease. The incidence of death to that of infection is not even as 1 to 100. Think of the hours and days of work lost by those who did not actually die, only being profoundly incapaci­ tated; and think of the thousands who, thorough­ ly debilitated by malaria, succumbed to other diseases to which malaria made them easy vicThe West Coast Life Insurance Company offers A full line of modern life insurance contracts designed to meet every need of business or personal protection. For particulars and quotations consult the Philippine Branch Office West Coast Life Insurance Co. Kneedler Building Telephone 664 Manila, P. I. tims. The economic cost is incalculable. The cost in depleted energy, psychic and physical. We are all convulsed by the humor in the Southern negro dialogues, Two Old Crows; their muddled, languid faculties are highly amusing. But humor changes to tragedy when we contemplate whole countries, the richest in the world, in­ habited by peoples whom, for the most part, malaria has turned into old crows. That is what malaria does, that is what it has done in the Philippines, what it is doing now. That is why one speaks truth when he says, get rid of malaria and recreate the world. II Malaria can be conquered, we know that now. It can be given the gate and the gate can be effectively locked against its return. For a long time malaria was preventing the building of the new water-supply system for Manila. Competent engineers were on the job, with machinery and work gangs. The plans were all right. Money was ample. But the gangs couldn’t be kept on the job. Malaria made men sick, laid them off and killed them by scores. J. B. “Jack” Finley, with a contract of six kilometers of tunnel and ditch, lost 105 men whom he sent off the job to San Lazaro hospital. They were attacked by malaria and they died of the disease, in spite of quinine and hospital care. He heard of others who quit the job and started for home, dying on the way. Others reached home and died; and others, many others, fatally contracted other diseases. Findley didn’t give up. He sought control of the malady, got it under control at last and came out with flying colors. Gordon and Haley, building the Novaliches dam for the great new impounding reservoir, had similar experience; and the government, understanding, extended their contract. That all-important dam, assuring the future growth of Manila, could not be put in until malaria had been put under effective control. No engineering problem stood in the way, only a health problem, a sanitation problem which proved well nigh insurmountable. That problem, like the malarial problem at Panama, was not on the blue prints! Now let’s turn to an agricultural industry, sugar. The prevailing problem in sugar produc­ tion is the reduction of costs per picul. The incidence of malaria rises surprisingly in many sugar localities with the advent of the cutting season, with an inevitable addition to produc­ tion costs per picul. The hospitals fill, labor turnover becomes excessive, efficiency drops. The unseen enemy plays havoc with the ledger. Nothing is wrong with the mill, with transport, or with the crop; energies flag and costs go up merely because of malaria. Even well men quit when the epidemics spread. It is sheer economic waste. In connection with a sugar central, Del Car­ men, the first effective regional or local control of a malarial condition in the Philippines was brought about by the Rockefeller Foundation men in 1925 and has been continued ever since. Prior to that time, on the Smith-Bell plantation, IN RESPONDING TO ADVERTISEMENTS PLEASE MENTION THE AMERICAN CHAMBER OF COMMERCE JOURNAL April, 1928 THE AMERICAN CHAMBER OF COMMERCE JOURNAL 13 milling at Del Carmen, 30 and 40 and 50 malarial cases were continually in the hospital during the cutting season. Now there is practically no hospitalization, and the incidence of malaria is unimportant. From Carmencita, another Del Carmen plantation, equally favorable reports come; reduction of labor turnover makes an annual saving of about 1*25,000. At San Jose, Mindoro, where the first of the modem sugar centrals was established in the Philippines, Manager Sinclair, working with the health service and the Rockefeller Foundation, has got malaria under control at last. He can get labor, and hold labor, because labor can stay well and keep on the job. The time seems to be approaching when quininization may be dispensed with at San Jose, and prevention may be depended upon alone. Think of what this means in Mindoro, Manila’s nextdoor wilderness. Anciently Mindoro was prosperously populated, the earliest written records of the Philippines, those of the Chinese, show that the Chinese junk fleets then went to Mindoro as their principal Philippine trading point. Why did the jungle conquer this thriving civilization and convert Mindoro into a wilder­ ness again? Malaria is the only explanation. And for all the recent effort that has been made, with the best of engineers and plenty of capital and machinery, Mindoro, until the malaria was put under control, remained all but a forbidden land. Here is one of the archipelago’s largest and richest islands, most favorably situated for industry and commerce. When malaria can be quashed in Mindoro, there is hope for all. More than hope, there is actual assurance. Ill The isolated examples cited of the successful conquest of malaria serve to illustrate the new science of the disease which the health service and the Rockefeller Foundation have been per­ fecting in the Philippines. This is the third, the most important point to be made. Put the question popularly, where does man get malaria, and every layman will answer knowingly that he gets it from the bite of the Rodman Wannamaker’s Practical View of Big Figure Life Insurance In November, 1924, Current Opinion was able to say of Rodman Wannamaker, New York merchant who died last month, that he was the most insured man in the world. Wanna­ maker was then 61 years old, his life was insured for $6,000,000; but he died at 65 insured for $7,500,000. In 1924, Wanna­ maker, still considered a sound insurance risk, had scouts out over the world trying to get new policies for him; he wished to reach the theoretical maximum on one man’s life, $7,200,000, and he was finally able to surpass this by $300,000. Life insurance was no mania with him; he said it was the only means by which he could assure his estate liquid cash when needed, in sufficient amounts for taxes and other expenses, without the sacrifice of other invested assets. It was a very logical and prudent viewpoint, protective of the Wannamaker estate. He paid the premiums out of his personal funds. Life insurance to the amount of millions has sold itself to the American big business man. When Wannamaker had six millions, Pierre S. Dupont had $4,000,000; Adolph Zukor, $3,715,000; James C. Penney and Percy A. Rockefeller, $3,000,000 each; J. P. Morgan, $2,750,000; William Fox, $2,850,000; B. E. Bensinger, 1’2,500,000; and Will Hays, $2,000,000. Marcus Loew, who died not long ago, carried $5,000,000. anopheles mosquito, of course. That is common knowledge to every school child. It isn’t, how­ ever, very satisfactory. Among all the anophe­ les, some 15 species or more in the Philippines, one only is the criminal—transcending in de­ structiveness Atilla, Genghis Khan, Alexander, Caesar, Hannibal and Napoleon rolled into one. That arch fiend is the anopheles minimus, a little feller! None of the others count, so far as malaria is concerned. This is the first of a sequence of decisive facts. The second in the sequence is, the little feller can’t fly very far, not much more than a mile. Keep a settlement clear of the little feller for a radius of 1—1/2 kilometers, and keep your people to themselves/ and it matters not how much malaria may be raging in and devastating the land beyond: your particular settlement is safe. The third fact in the vital sequence is, anophe­ les minimus, the deadly little feller, spawns its larvae only in clear running streams and prefer­ ably in the swirls and eddies where the current has cut into the bank or under overhanging foliage and created a benignant shade and quiet­ ude. These are the lairs of the anopheles mini­ mus. Therefore he may be tracked down and destroyed like ordinary forest game, and it doesn’t take a scientist to do it; ordinary work­ men may be taught to do it, they become very skillful at it. Just as fields may be fenced to keep out roving animals, so may whole planta­ tions—and fortunately even single plantations— be rid of anopheles minimus. The fourth fact of the sequence relates to the SUFE INSURANCE vide for hfs depenJ^J’*' TotheBusinessM^PM)!^ lund-isan asset foany TotheWidow-MAIMJjM Wliat Is i to You The Insular Life Assurance Co., Ltd. MANILA, P. I. Low rates iberal conditions ocal investments oans on real estates repayable monthly instalments, at ow interest If a mindful man with a fixed salary dies, he will only leave a small saving to his family For about F31.00 annually our company guarantees the payment of Pl,000 to your wife or sons in case of death, or to the insured himself if he survives the policy. Call or write for particulars to: The Manufacturers Life Insurance Co. E. E. ELSER, General Agent 405 Kneedler Building, Manila P. O. Box 598 Phone 2-24-29 HOME OFFICE 4th Floor, Filipinas Bldg. Plaza Moraga, Manila, P. I. P. O. Box 128 C. S. SALMON 3rd Floor, Gaches Bldg. Escolta cor. T. Pinpin 115 P. O. Box 734, Manila V. SINGSON ENCARNACION, President J. McMICKING, Manager IN RESPONDING TO ADVERTISEMENTS PLEASE MENTION THE AMERICAN CHAMBER OF COMMERCE JOURNAL 14 THE AMERICAN CHAMBER OF COMMERCE JOURNAL April, 1928 weapon which kills anopheles minimus. It is Paris green, prepared by formula, in a mixture of 1 to 100 with ordinary road dust. How to prepare it and how to apply it can be learned in ten minutes by any alert individual. Nor does it require a lot of the mixture, which is quite inexpensive. A surprisingly small lot is lethal to the enemy. Over in a laboratory room of the Bureau of Science the Rockefeller Foundation men were cultivating the larvae of anopheles minimus. In a corner of the room, cut off by high partitions so that no hint of the powder got into the air, Paris green was prepared. Though it was the corner farthest away from the larvae, the larvae consistently died; deadly to the anopheles minimus, the atmosphere of the room was otherwise entirely innocuous. In practical use no mechanism is required to apply the mix­ ture. Men don rubber boots, take the trail upstream, and dust the mixture lightly about where a little experience teaches them the enemy is sure to be lurking. IV That is about all there is to the story of pre­ vention, which signifies malarial control without necessarily quininization. Quinine is palliative, Something About Our Neighbor: Justice Johnson This paper is designed to speed Justice and Mrs. Johnson on a pleasant voyage and visit to the United States and a safe and early return to the Philippines. They left Manila late in March for the homeland, to spend the summer there and to return to the islands as early as possible after the court vacation. They fre­ quently make such trips, in fact they make them almost every year, saving when Justice Johnson happens to be the vacation-duty justice; and certainly they have probably never foregone them on election years, since Republicanism is deep in the Johnsonian blood and a look-in on the national convention has held peculiar pleas­ ures for Justice Johnson from the days of his early boyhood. He was bred and born in the presidential state, you see, Ohio; he remembers the opening remark of his uncle, Judge West—it is a family of judges, indeed, on both sides—placing in nomination for the presidency James G. Blaine in 1884: “I was bred and born a Republican. Had I not been, I should seek the earliest opportunity to be born again!” Ingersoll followed, with his famous Plumed Knight address. It can’t be denied, politics is a serious factor in life in Ohio. Then, of course, Justice Johnson has known many of the presidents personally, and most of them intimately, from Garfield and Hayes down to Harding and Coolidge. It is one errand of his, when in the United States, to confer with the president. His opinions on the Philippines are naturally valuable to the White House. Elias Finley Johnson was a professor of law in the University of Michigan when President McKinley faced the problem of establishing courts in the Philippines, and McKinley gave the first appointment to a Philippine judgeship to John­ son. The appointment was dated October 7, 1900, “to the judiciary of the Philippine Islands.” The courts were not yet organized, this did not occur until July 1901; but Johnson had been in Manila since March of that year, and when the judiciary act went into effect he went into the provinces to organize courts of first instance. He organized these courts in Zambales, La Union, Pangasinan, Benguet, and Ilocos Sur. Insurrection still disturbed the peace of the provinces. Johnson was often accompanied by a military escort. He found buildings for the courts, bought tools and lumber and made with his own hands some of the necessary furniture. On July 14, 1903, he was appointed judge of the court of first instance. His plans at that time, with two years of pioneer judicial work here, were to go home; he and Mrs. Johnson, with their children, were on their way home when the news reached them that President Roosevelt had appointed Judge Johnson an associate justice of the Philippine supreme court. Con­ tinuing the voyage, they visited only briefly in not preventive. There is probably not a single industrial or agricultural project in the Philippines which cannot take effective advantage of this seemingly simple knowledge, the quintescence of prolonged and costly research in the islands and throughout the whole world for generations. No one now, facing a malarial problem, need wait upon either the government or his neighbors, unless the latter closely hem him in. Novaliches has been made a training station for personnel; in all there are five control stations in the islands, the work developing to greater effectiveness all the time. Any plantation manager, any project engineer, can acquire the essential technique of malarial control by making a few visits to the Novaliches training station, first making arrangements at health-service headquarters. More, the health service and the Rockefeller Foundation experts will respond to requests for assistance. They will survey your malarial problem, map out a program, aid in putting it into effect, and provide continuous supervision. The day has dawned in these islands when the devastating, often disastrous, human and mate­ rial losses from malaria can be eliminated. Hon. E. Finley Johnson America and then returned to the new duties in Manila. These have been Justice Johnson’s duties ever since; often they have made him the acting chief justice of the court, when the post was vacant or when the incumbent was ill, as during the greater part of the years 1924 and 1925. His membership in the court covers a period of 25 years, the heart of a long and vigorous life. Born at Van Wert, Ohio, June 24, 1861, he was not quite 40 years old when he came to Manila in 1901, but he is now nearing his 67th birthday. His ripened and most productive years have been given to the islands. And never stintedly given, either. ’For many years the Johnsons have resided in their bayshore house in Pasay, where the dawn of every new morning finds the justice, who weighs 285 pounds, taking his constitutional in the surf. He swims expertly, with the zest of a boy, and only the most threatening typhoons keep him out of the water. But at 7 o’clock he is in his office, where his day, begun at that hour, may be prolonged until sundown. There are but nine justices, including the chief justice; there is no intermediate court of appeals, so that the work thrown on the court is prodigious in volume and incessant in its demands. In a single year Justice Johnson has written more than 260 decisions, more than the whole number of decisions written in a year by the entire bench of many state supreme courts. Naturally, many of Justice Johnson’s decisions are leading cases in the jurisprudence of the islands. He has also penned dissents which have afforded him as much satisfaction in the final denouement as the better known and more vital majority decisions he has written. During the first year he was on the court, the court was reversed 11 times by the Supreme Court of the United States, and from seven of those 11 deci­ sions Justice Johnson had dissented. Latterly the court has seldom been reversed; appeals are only by writ of certiorari; the power of the court is great, its independence surpassing that of intermediate courts in the United States. But though there be honor enough, little of the fame of it travels across the Pacific, and it is, for the American members of the court, peculiar­ ly restricted honor. In the beginning the rule was established that the chief justice of the court should be a Filipino; this rule has long operated, since Justice Johnson became the senior member of the court in point of service, to prevent his appointment to the chief justiceship in which he had hopes of retiring. The appointment was widely recommended when the latest vacancy occurred, but President Coolidge chose to adhere to the rule. (It should be added, on the other side, that the court comprises four Filipinos and five Americans; the rule dates with the time when Filipino lawyers were little, acquainted with American procedure and juris­ prudence.) Justice Johnson has served with 33 associates on the court; they have come and gone, and few are left of the original bench of Who will deny that great personal sacrifices were involved, in all probability, in Justice Johnson’s resolve to throw his lot definitely in with the Philippines? It can hardly be doubt­ ed that he would have gone to the bench in the United States, or that politics would have claim­ ed him for special honors; he was well known in Michigan, influentially connected in Ohio. His mother, Margaret Gillespie, was a relative of James G. Blaine. An uncle, who had been a judge, who was blind and had acquired the popular sobriquet of “the blind orator of Ohio,” had been governor of the state. His father was Judge Abel Johnson. He himself was equipped with an excellent education and long experience in the law, and he had the physical vigor and taste for active politics. Surely Ohio would long ago have singled him out for high reward. An inadequate sketch of our neighbor, Justice Johnson, folks, of him whose memorial addresses alone have exalted the annals of Manila: selection (may be made of those on McKinley, Roosevelt, Arellano, Mapa, Torres (these three all members of the court, and the first two chief justices), Harding, Wood, Crossfield. INFORMATION FOR INVESTORS Expert, confidential reports made on Philippine projects ENGINEERING, MINING, AGRICULTURE, FORESTRY, LUMBER, ETC. Hydroelectric projects OTHER COMMERCIAL AND INDUSTRIAL ENTERPRISES BRYAN, LANDON CO. Cebu, P. I. Cable address: “YPIL,” Cebu. IN RESPONDING TO ADVERTISEMENTS PLEASE MENTION THE AMERICAN CHAMBER OF COMMERCE JOURNAL