Facts About Endemics of Echinococcosis

Abstract

It has been stated that water scarcity and lowering of personal hygiene down to complete annihilation, represents one of the many factors of endemism of echinococcosis (Deve, Ježic). A rough comparison of that State of things in Dalmatia, Hercegovina and Bosnia definitely confirms that thesis. Starting from the well-known fact that the personal hygiene among Moslems is far better developed and that Islam as a religion advocates the cult of water, the authors set themselves the task, comparing echinococcosal disease of Moslems and Non-Moslems under identical conditions, to try and discover a scientific documentation for that thesis. The authors have therefore studied biometrically their 606 cases of echinococcosis in hospital from 1939 to 1955 divided into groups of 135 Moslems and 471 Non-Moslems.

In the first part of the discussion the authors examined correlative relations of the population and its infestedness with echinococcosis and tried to standardize by elimination the influence of Moslems and Non-Moslems alternately. Thus we succeeded, taking into account quantities of changes of the population according to confession to register qualitative changes of those infested by echinococcosis regardless of confessional structure of the population. This really amounted to a common confessional denominator of those deceased.

In the second part of our discussion about correlations we succeeded similarly to eliminate the influence of annual number of patients according to confession and sex infested by echinococcosis. (See Appendix tables VII to XII.) In the third part of our discussion about correlations we examined the standardization of echinococcosal patients in hospitals according to age structure. (See tables XIII to XVIII.)

In the fourth part of our discussion about correlations we examined the influence of duration of hospitalization according to sex and confession of patients infested by echinococcosis. (See tables XIX to XXIV).

We verified ordinary parallelisms in every case by partial correlations. They diminished partly more, partly less, and we registered cases where positive parallelisms sometimes changed into negative ones under the influence of standardization. The basic thesis was always confirmed, namely, that confession ally influenced usage and its corresponding forms of social contact on a certain degree of development favour or disfavour the spread of echinococcosis among population. Though the Moslems are hospitalized more than Non-Moslems for certain reasons, the ratio being 61 to 51, if we take into account that ratio compared -with the number of population as a whole, we found that echinococcosis is really more intimately connected with the Non-Moslems population than with Moslems themselves (58 : 23). Though the difference is not absolute (18%), it is evident. Thus, echinococcosis is more rarely represented among Moslem population than among Non-Moslems. We ascribe this phenomenon to a higher hygiene and to much greater use of water among Moslems.

We therefore consider that we have supported the thesis, outside the factors known so far that the endemic echinococcosis, owing to sheep-breeding, dogs as vectors of a phase of development, free slaughter without supervisors of slaughter-houses, and general low level of culture,we may add another reason — the scarcity of water as an equivalent factor, though adjuvant one.