Health > Housing and malaria

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These people were performing their ordinary work, and the screens were
presumably mosquito-proof and not merely fly-proof, as in the last-quoted case.
Boyd (1926) reports from South East Missouri, U.S.A., on 583 occupied rural
dwellings with coarse screening of 12 to 14 meshes to the inch intended merely to
keep out flies. The question of malaria was based on histories.
Screening
Tight Houses
Good
Poor
None
Open Houses
Screened
No Screens
Number
of houses
174
146
43
88
53
Population
846
812
246
408
258
Total cases
43
95
47
52
61
Cases per
house
5-i
11.7
19.1
12.7
23-5
Rates per 100
residents
O.24
O.65
O.92
o-59
1.12
Boyd adds, “ These data show that [the statement that] £ no screening is better
than poor screening ’ is not true, but that anything which puts difficulties in the way
of an anopheles is good ”.
Coogle (1927) reports from Leflore County, Miss., U.S.A., that bi-monthly
inspections of 104 screened and 104 unscreened houses showed an average of 2.2
A. quadrimaculatus per screened and one of 16.5 per unscreened house, while
malaria cases in the two sets of houses were 24 and 84 respectively. In the paper in
which he spoke of the “ bedroom rate of anopheles ”, Williams (1925) adds of the
single well-screened house already mentioned :
‘ The following year the owner of the screened home and two of his children
came down with malaria. He stated that he had lost faith in us and our theory
of malaria transmission. We searched his house immediately and found that his
wife had removed the stoves from the bedrooms and had neglected to put the
covers on the stove-pipe openings. We found 18 A. quadrimaculatus roosting in
the first bedroom.”
Aldershoff and Korteweg (1927) reported on an area under observation in
Holland with this result :
Year
Screened Rooms
Unscreened Rooms
Number Number get- Number
sleeping Ung malaria sleeping
1924 2-3 3 I_3
1925 3-5 13 2-5
1926 217 4 I20
Number get¬
ting malaria
14
18
16