MEDICINE: Flit Guns in India

A new method of fighting malaria—commonest disease on earth—is being used to protect the residents of Delhi, India’s capital, and the U.S. troops quartered there from the epidemic now raging among the 100,000,000 people of northwest India. Gangs of trained workmen go from house to house all day spraying a mixture of pyrethrum insecticide (5%) and kerosene (95%) on the walls and rafters where the night-flying mosquitoes rest. The sprayers are all lads of good caste, so no highborn Hindu will be outraged by their attentions to his residence, outhouse and cowshed, each of which must be re-sprayed every week or so. First night after spraying all mosquitoes vanish.

Big advantage of the new technique, which was developed during the last three years by Rockefeller Foundation scientists in India, is its cheapness. Cost runs about 8¢ per person per season, whereas “permanent” malaria-control measures—draining marshes, filling ponds, etc.—would cost about $1.50 per person per season. And the rice fields where mosquitoes breed cannot be drained or oiled.