REPORT ON THE WORKING OF THE KING INSTITUTE, GUINDY
I X . C O N C L U S I O N .
The King Institute is the premier laboratory for the Presidency of
Madras, and the whole of Southern India relies upon it for bacteriological
and serological diagnostic work, the manufacture and supply of vaccine
lymph, prophylactic and curative vaccines and sera, and for expert
advice in connexion with infectious and epidemic diseases. It is of
paramount importance therefore that its laboratories should be thoroughly
up-to-date and well-equipped in every branch of preventive medicine and
public health work.
The epidemiology of most infectious diseases in the tropics is intima
-
tely connected with various kinds of insects, biting as well as non-biting,
the study of which in consequence, now forms an important branch of
preventive medicine. Some of these insects act as carriers of infection by
simple transference of the virus, as in the typhoid fevers and cholera,
while in other diseases such as malaria and elephantiasis, it is essential
that the virus, which stands much higher in the zoological scale, must
undergo profound changes within the bodies of certain biting insects,
before it can become infective to human beings. There are yet other insects,
which simply inject the virus through their bites, e.g., the rat-flea,
conveying plague from an infected rat, or the louse spreading relapsing
fever from infected human beings to the healthy. In such epidemic
diseases, therefore, the problem of prevention also involves the problems
of the prevention of breeding and multiplication of the various insects
concerned. From the public health point of view these problems
assume a very great importance; they can only be solved by an expert
Entomologist fully acquainted with the bionomics of insects.
Similarly, worms are the cause of much suffering which has not yet
been fully realized. Apart from the common intestinal worms such as
the round-worm and the thread-worm which often produce very grave
symptoms, there are a number of others whose life history is as yet but
imperfectly known, and which cause ill-effects on the human hosts some
-
times of an extremely serious nature. The hook-worm, for example,
which is prevalent on a very large scale in this Presidency, causes
a disease which under certain conditions in some countries, has
"veritably overwhelmed the birth rate and threatened the very
existence of the race." Other worms infest other parts of the human
body. Thus elephantiasis which is also extremely common in some
parts of the Presidency, is a chronic disease caused by a worm injected
through the bite of the culex mosquito; while the Guinea-worm
disease in which the infection takes place through drinking water
containing infected cyclops (a kind of water-flea), has been known to
cause such grave inflammatory swellings and abscesses as to incapacitate
the inhabitants of villages in the infected areas, and seriously hamper all
agricultural operations. Bilharzial disease, cases of which have been
lately imported into India from Egypt and adjoining countries, where it is
very common, needs to be carefully watched; it produces severe lesions
of extreme chronicity, which, when complicated by septic changes, are apt
to become incurable. Besides these few examples, there are many other
worms which are conveyed through the common domestic animals, and
which gravely interfere with the well-being of the human population. It
is essential therefore, to study the life histories of these worms and devise
means for preventing the infection. In most laboratories this work is
entrusted to expert Helminthologists.
In addition to the above, there are certain protozoal organisms which
are also concerned in the causation of epidemics of malaria and other
fevers, amoebic dysentery, kala-azar, relapsing fever, infectious jaundice,
rat-bite fever, tick fever and diarrhœas, which still need considerable
further investigation.