Communicability of kála-ázar

163

having suffered most severely, as many as possible of the
new coolies have been put in a new line just about 200 yards
from the badly infected lines. In January 1895, a batch
of 200 coolies arrived on this garden, and 150 of them
were placed in the new lines, but 50 were put in the old
infected lines for want of room. During the two following
years, 2 of the 150 new line coolies died from dysentery,
but none from kála-ázar ; during the same period, to out of
the 50 old line coolies died, 8 of the deaths being from kála-
ázar. Thus 16 per cent. of the 50, who lived in the infected
lines, died in two years of the epidemic fever, but none of the
150 coolies of the same batch who lived in the new line some
200 yards from the old ones. Comment seems unnecessary,
as the figures speak for themselves.

      The exact way in which the first cases occur on any gar-
den is not always very easy to trace, especially if, as has
usually been the case hitherto, the disease is at first thought
to be ordinary malarial fever. The following case is an in-
teresting one in this connection:—An out-garden at the end
of a valley, and consequently with no traffic through it, suffered
severely from the disease, and the main garden to which it
belongs now also has the disease rather badly. A neigh-
bouring garden, only one mile from the first-mentioned out-
garden, but under a separate management, has remained quite
free of the disease for several years, during which its near
neighbour was suffering so severely. This peculiar distribu-
tion of the disease was not easy to explain until it transpired
that the badly infected out-garden was almost entirely worked
by old coolies, many of the relatives of whom had settled in
a village, some 8 miles distant, near the out-garden, the lines
of which have been already mentioned as having been moved
on account of the severity of the disease in them. This
village has also suffered from the disease, and through them
doubtless their relatives in the out-of-the-way garden at the
end of the valley became infected.

      In another part of the Nowgong district, there had been

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