8
from the works, for nothing is so unsettling as sickness, and, as malaria
in the labour camps increases, many members of families decimated
by the disease endeavour to reach their homes often under conditions
of great hardship. These points are very well illustrated in a case
referred to in another connection by Major Leonard Rogers, I.M.S.,
in his report upon Kala-Azar, 1897. ( P. xii, Appendix I).
"A coolie woman, aged 19, from the Assam-Bengal Railway (then
under construction) was admitted to the Nowgong dispensary during
the rainy season of 1896 suffering from marked anmia and dropsy
of the feet and face. The history of her illness was that she got on all
right until her father died, after which she lived with another coolie
girl, and according to her story she only received about one rupee a
month from the contractor (probably minimum living allowances,
tide Chapter VI) and was consequently unable to feed herself properly.
She soon became ill and as she did not improve she left the works and
begged her way into Nowgong, living on what she could pick up on the
way."
The clauses in brackets are ours.
Thus it happens that new centres of infection are set up in places
even many miles removed from the original source of the mischief,
and once these have been established the gangs of fresh labourers
travelling to the scene of work contract infection as soon as they have
entered the dangerous zone, while they are still perhaps some distance
from their destination. And thus by one unending train of vicious
cycles once set in motion there may result a wide-spread epidemic,
far reaching and disastrous in proportion as its initial cause is
extensive and important.
And again those who return to their homes or seek new seats of
industry carry the infection of malaria wherever they go, and, if their
numbers be at all considerable, and they must often be so, serve to assist
in the dissemination of malaria throughout remote districts. Involved
secondarily in the general troubles are Europeans employed upon
the enterprise; while should the conditions last for sufficiently long
a period, as they have done in the Duars and other places, we may