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Show Cattle Tick Fever Nearly Wiped Out in United States Washington. The areas under federal quarantine against cattle tick fever in the South have just reduced by 23,150 square miles, eliminating all remaining quarantined parishes in Louisiana Lou-isiana and leaving under the ban three small blocks in Florida and two larger groups of counties on the eastern and southwestern boundaries of Texas. Total wiping out of the disease in the United States is in sight. Cattle tick fever is a classic In the annals of bacteriology and medicine medi-cine because it was the first disease dis-ease proved to be carried by an Insect or more strictly, in this particular case, a tick; for ticks are not insects. It was the eight-een-nineties that the late Dr. Theobald Smith, then of the United States Department of Agriculture followed a "blind hunch" supplied by Texas stockmen and proved scientifically sci-entifically that ticks are the can. riers of this disease. Later, it was found that insects as well as other species of ticks are responsible for the spread of many diseases afflicting af-flicting both humans and animals. Dipping and Quarantine. The United States Department of Agriculture, with the strong co-operation of the states concerned, undertook un-dertook to eradicate this costly malady of cattle. Two principal means are employed; dipping the cattle in tick-killing baths and forbidding shipment of animals that might be harboring ticks into disease-free areas. How effective this campaign has been told by a glance at the Department De-partment of Agriculture's "tick map." On July 1, 1906, when the work was first taken in hand, the cattle tick fever area included practically prac-tically the whole South, plus the southern half of California a total of 728,565 square miles. The areas left under quarantine now add up to only 33,571 square miles, not much more than the single ftata of South Carolina. |