17
thoroughly. The people objected to desiocation as they had to provide their own fuel and
only 10 rooms were desiccated. The cost of desiccating a room is stated as eight annas.
Infection.
Infection was due in most cases to human agency. The District Plague Medical
Officer states that infection was most com-
monly carried from one village to another,
by persons incubating plague, but the disease was also conveyed by infected clothing.
Once introduced, plague was carried from one part of a village to another by rats
which were often observed to die in houses before human beings were attacked.
No measures were taken for the destruction of rats.
Type.
The prevalent type of plague was bubonic, and only a fewer septic and pneumonic
cases were observed.
Medical Staff.
The special Medical Staff on plague duty in the district consisted of one Assistant
Surgeon, one Hospital Assistant and one Com-
pounder.
AMBALA DISTRICT.
Epidemic.
2g. The third epidemic which has visited the Ambala District was much less severe
than that of the previous year, for while in
that year 29.752 plague cases with 22,762
deaths were reported, only 8,988 cases with 6,318 deaths were returned during the year
under report. .
The epidemic increased steadily from its commencement up till the week ending
December the 20th, from which time until the end of January it remained almost
stationary. During February and March plague increased rapidly and the epidemic
reached its climax during April. It had almost died out during August and the first half of
September, but reappeared during the latter half of this month.
The bearing of the people towards the epidemic was one of apathy, and they
availed themselves little of measures for combating the spread of plague.
Precautionary measures.
There was practically no surveillance over arrivals from infected areas exercised in
any part of the district. If villages were very
badly infected the inhabitants of other villages
did at times prevent persons coming from them entering their own village, but this was
the exception rather than the rule. On the whole, however, the villagers were careful
to avoid very badly infected places.
Evacuation.
Evacuation was never adopted except in a very half-hearted and useless way which
had no effect whatever on the progress of
the disease. If the first to be attacked with
the disease happened to be very low-caste people, the Lambardárs did occasionally turn
them out of the villages. But in the case of any other class of persons this was never
done.
Treatment
Medical treatment was very popular and was very generally accepted. A special
dispensary was started in Ambala and from it
some 300 cases were treated with very grati-
fying results.
Disinfection.
Only two rooms are reported to have been chemically disinfected and the measure
was most unpopular and in the absence of
thorough evacuation was never attempted :
441 rooms were desiccated with Sawhney's stove, but the method was adopted too late
in the season to permit of an estimation being made of its efficacy.
Infection.
The disease was disseminated by human agency, both direct and by infected clothing-
Several instances were observed where thieves'
who had stolen infected clothing and taken it
¡away to their own villages, died there of the disease, and the District Plague Medical Officer
records an instance in which some people maliciously threw a bag containing dead rats
into an old woman's house at Jagádhri She opened the bag and when she saw what was
in it threw it and its contents away. She, however, developed plague and died 7 days
later. In some cases the dissemination of the disease was ascribed to náís who visit two
or three villages Several villages, where rat mortality was very high in the preceding
season, escaped lightly or were free during the present one. Rupar Town was an example
of this. In the previous epidemic rat mortality had been so great that rats were very rare
in the town during the earlier months of the present epidemic and plague did not reappear
in the town until May 1903.
Influence of soil, &c.
It was observed that, both in tahsíls and in individual villages, those which had had
a severe visitation during the previous epidemic
escaped lightly during the present one. The
¡area of maximum incidence of the disease also showed, when compared with the previous
year, a distinct tendency to travel from north to south.