Armstrong – Table of Contents

on September 3, 1921. No cases were reported from the involved areas after January
1922 (the date of the report). The last case occurred on June 13, 1921.
The sanitation team deloused 6,205 men, women and children during the general
campaign, exclusive of about 1,000 who they deloused individually prior to the organized
or general campaign. The total figures did not take into account the considerable number
of “repeaters” who voluntarily underwent repeated delousing, some even following from
one delousing station to another.
The team also strove to protect the locals employed in the delousing operations.
Three of the attendants were immune to typhus. The team issued to all attendants one-
piece uniforms of louse-tight material and instructed the attendants about personal
bathing procedures, and the steaming of uniforms and clothing. No cases of typhus
developed among any of the employees.
According to Armstrong, the eradication campaign had a number of salutary
effects among the involved population. In addition to the eradication of the disease from
the reservation, a benefit of scarcely less importance was the educational value of the
campaign among the inhabitants. Culturally, they viewed bathing initially with suspicion
and fear, but later they came to enjoy it. They willingly brought their families and
household belongings distances of from 10 to 50 miles in order that they might be
cleaned. Traders were selling large quantities of soap on the reservation at the close of the
campaign, whereas previously its use among the Navajo was extremely limited.
Another salutary effect was learning about the nature of the typhus and how to actively
control the disease. The Navajo, who had passively accepted their body vermin as a
natural and necessary evil – since they believed that lice came from inside the body and