154

Report on Kála-ázar.

their village, as the disease was still very fatal among them.
They moved to a different piece of land, which is between one
and two hundred yards from the old site. The deserted
site still remains unoccupied, for when it was proposed to
build police lines on it, all the men of the force so strongly
objected on the ground of the fear of infection, that the
proposal was abandoned. It took these people, who had been
reduced from about 600 to only 200, one month to effect the
move. They had at the time of my visit been a year in the
new place. During the year before they moved, they had 20
deaths from kála-ázar, and at the time of their moving, they
had two cases, which they took with them. One of these died
soon after, but the other recovered. Two new cases only
appeared in the last year, one of whom was noticed to have
fever very soon after they had moved, the other began early
in the rains. Of these last two, the former recovered and the
latter died. The two cases who recovered, or were at least
alive and much better in January 1897, are shown on the
right of the photograph cases at the Mangaldai dispensary,
which was taken in August 1896, opposite page 33. I have
met with other instances in which whole villages have been
moved to new sites during the cold weather, purely in order to
get rid of the disease, and it was very commonly done by the
Garos years ago for the same reason.

    No more conclusive evidence of the communicability of the
disease could be wished for than that furnished by this instance;
but what is of the greatest interest is the proof which it
furnishes of the infection being of an indirect nature in some
instances, for the two sufferers from kála-ázar, who undoubted-
ly infected this village, had both left it a month or two before
the persons who resided in the very two houses in which they
bad lived, began to get fever. It is of course possible that
the disease may have a long incubation period, but this is very
unlikely, for the fact that I have met with an instance in which
a man got the fever within three days of arriving in Gauhati,
although he only stayed there one week, and then returned to