Infectious Diseases: Kill Those Pigeons?

In Daphne du Maurier's story and Alfred Hitchcock's movie, The Birds, it is the birds that go berserk and attack man. Last week in New York City, it was man who, after generations of meek submission to fowl indignities, turned upon the birds. The city government was considering exterminating the pigeons that drop their excrement on park benches, statues and hurrying pedestrians. City officials are convinced at last that the pigeons — up to 5,000,000 of them, by some of the wilder estimates — are an intolerable menace to health.

At least two deaths this year have been definitely traced...