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Show Tuberculosis On The Run Twenty years from now tuberculosis, once a leading cause of death, may have joined bubonic plague, yellow fever and polio among the almost forgotten medical rarities of the Western World. At least that is the implication of figures compiled and analyzed by Dr. Louis I. Dublin, dean of American health statisticians, statis-ticians, in which he traces the steady disappearance of tuberculosis tubercu-losis from our mortality tables. The most spectacular drop in the TB death rate occurred with the introduction of the antibiotics streptomycin and dihy-drostreptomycin, dihy-drostreptomycin, subsequently aided by such potent pharmaceutical pharma-ceutical allies as the drugs PAS and isoniazid. The relentless conquest of tuberculosis by modern medications medica-tions was recently dramatized in a special dispatch to the New York Times from Saranac Lake, New York. As late as ten years ago, Saranac was still synonymous the world over with the rest cures and surgery which were the old pattern of tuberculosis treatment. In 1948, some 1200 chest operations were performed in the Saranac Lake General Hospital alone. Last year there were 86. In one peak year at the end of World War I, the Saranac census showed more than 1700 patients in 165 private sanitoriums. Now there are only eleven sanitoriums with 57 patients, among them some who reject discharge in order to live out their old age in familiar surroundings. As Saranac's village leaders admit, the health "industry" is dead. The Adirondack community commu-nity sees recreation, rather than sanitoriums and hospitals, as its future. All this is amply supported on a nation-wide scale. In 1900 there were an appalling 200 deaths from tuberculosis for every 100,00 population. By 1957 this mortality rate had dropped to 7.8 per 100,000, and at the present rate of decrease the figure "should probably decline to 0.3 per 100,000 by 1975." However, the HNI warns us, the reassuring fact that we have medical research and the mass manufacture of new drugs to thank for deadly weapons against tuberculosis is no reason for complacency or indifference. The bacillus is still very much with us. A consensus of sources indicates that there are Still nearly a quarter of a million active cases of TB in the U. S. and perhaps 800,00 active and inactive cases significant enough to warrant public health supervision. If Dr. Dublin's prediction is to be attained the ultimate answer lies not alone with health department or new drugs, but also with the individual who is alert and sophisticated about prevention, and who wins peace of mind by seeking periodic examinations. |