IMMUNIZATION AGAINST TUBERCULOSIS BY BACILLUS CALMETTE-GUÉRIN (BCG)

The decline in the death rate from tuberculosis in the registration states of the United States from nearly 200 per hundred thousand living to less than 80 during the year period 1900 to 1928 has led such statisticians as Dublin 1 to predict that this disease may almost disappear in our lifetime. Others are not as sanguine and they also point out that while the death rate is steadily and surely decreasing in the white races there is an increase in the death rate from tuberculosis in the negroes and Mexicans, especially in those who are crowding into the northern cities. More than 75,000 beds are now available in this country for the tuberculous, and upward of 150,000 patients are so cared for and isolated more or less from the community. Koch, 2 more than twenty-five years ago, believed that segregation of the tuberculous would achieve for tuberculosis what segregation