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Show 24. COMMISSIONER OF INDIAN AFFAIRS. requirements for eligibility and to secure applicants better trained t p teach sanitation. Unless the entrance salary is raised it will be imposaibie to secure the employees desired. The apportionment of the present appropriation for industrial work and care of timber, from which field matrons are paid, does not permit any increase in the salaries this year. Better transportation iacilities are needed in many places and should be sup plied. Other funds are not available for this purpose. It is proposed to increase the ei3ciency of the medical corps by sending them a few carefully selected journals and books on the diseases most common among Indians. There are on certain reservations hundreds of Indian homes without either openable windows, floors, or provision for ventilation; and it is on these very reservations that tuberculosfs is rife. Thfs is a house disease and thrives best under the conditions found in such homes. It is -n ro-n osed to use this fund to 'relievh such situations by rendering these homes sanitary, giving special atten-tion to those where tuberculosis is nreseut, makin-e them not only comfortable to the patient or patients, but also preventing them from becoming foci of inieetion. In every Indlan school there are pupils predisposed to tuberculosis, many of whom develop the disease and are sent home. Most of these children could be saved if at these schools facilities were available to carry out the modern method of outdoor sleeping. In schools in which this has been tried it has proven thoroughly practicable, and the results obtained justify the prediction that if all delicate children are required to sleep on screened porches while in attendance at school there will be a marked deereaae in the morbidity from this disease among Indian pupila. Play in the open air is now universally recognized as essential to the devel-opment of normal, healthy children. Indian schools should be thoroughly equipped this year with Blmple apparatus to stimulate pupils to spend their leisure in outdoor exercise. This measure alone will prevent the development of many cam of tubercular and other infectious diseases among Indian pupils. Thls fund will only be used in such schools where other funds are not available. A wide dissemination among Indians of educational literature containing the essential facts of aanitation and the prevention of the spread of disease is absolutely necessary if the Indians are to be educated to live more sanitary livea The above estimates include only those items which are not provided for in the appropriation for the "Relief of distress and prevention of disease, 1913," it betng assumed that $150,000 wlll be allowed. According to the most reliable statistics obtainable, the death rate among Indians is 160 per cent of that among all other classes in the registration area of the United States, and the mortality from tuber-culosis is three and one-half times as great. For the fiscal year 1913 the total funds available to meet these conditions are approximately $334,000. Stereopticon lectures, both to the school children and to the adult Indians on the reservation, have proved a most effective way of combating disease. Seeing has been found to be believing, and be-lieving has been responded to by action. Such lectures haye been given at substantially every school and reservation in Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Not a |