Federal Aid for Indigent Consumptives

To the Editor:  —After twenty-five years of struggle against the menace of the migratory consumptive, California offers a solution in the Kent bill. It is a problem that calls imperatively for solution not only in California, and in the southern and southwestern states and in Colorado, but it constitutes from 5 to 15 per cent, of the tuberculosis situation in the middle states, and in New York and Massachusetts. Every eastern manufacturer suffers immense economic loss from the shifting character of labor, even where the shifting is among the inefficient, and the inefficiency is traced to tuberculosis more than to any other single cause. It is estimated that 10,000 consumptives wander into California every year, filtering through Colorado, Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. Thirty per cent, are indigent when they arrive; 20 per cent. more become so within a year; between 10 and 28 per cent. die within thirty days