2
With regard to the mode of conveyance of bubonic plague from place to
place, it would appear that towns and villages remote from an infected centre
become infected by human intercourse, while contiguous places frequently
become infected by rats carrying and propagating the disease.
The latter mode of infection is well seen in the history of the progress of
the disease through Bándra, Pali, Chuim, Santa Cruz, and Joo, and also in the
case of Old Kurla village which became infected by rats from New Kurla.
In Bándra, which is practically a suburb of Bombay, the first local case
occurred on 3rd December in a house in which dead rats had been found about
one week before and the disease at once spread in this locality. On the same
date another local case had occurred in another part of the town in a house
where no rats had died. The disease did not spread in this locality, and it is
possible that the infection had been caught elsewhere.
In Pali dead rats were seen on the 6th or 7th of January, and the first case
occurred on 18th January.
In Chuim rats died in the beginning of February, and the first case occur-
red on the 9th of February, although it was not reported till the 12th February.
In Dánda in the same way dead rats were found in several houses prior to
the outbreak of the disease on llth February.
The above four villages separated from each other by a distance of about half
a mile are included in the Bándra Municipality.
In Santa Cruz, two miles distant from Bándra, dead rats were found on
12th February, and on 15th February the two first cases occurred in the house
in which the dead rats were found.
In Joo, which is separated from Dánda by a creek, dead rats were found in
a house about the 10th of April. The people thereupon removed to a shed for
ten days and then returned to the house which had not been disinfected, and
three days after their return the first case occurred in this house.
It would appear that the Bándra rats spread the disease in the adjacent
villages as they entirely disappeared from the town, and are only now, in the
beginning of June, reappearing.
Dead rats were in the same way discovered at an early stage of the local
outbreak in the villages of Vela Parla, Andheri, Goregaon, and Padali, which
form an almost continuous line of houses along the Bándra-Ghodbandar Road, the
intervals between the various villages being at that time filled up by the sheds
of Bombay refugees.
The disease appears to have been carried along this line of road as it was
carried in Bombay itself.
In Old Kurla village, which is only separated from New Kurla town by less
than half a mile of open fields, no case had occurred, though the disease was very
prevalent in New Kurla during January, February, and March.
On the 4th of April rats died in the house nearest New Kurla, and although
that and some of the adjoining houses were vacated and disinfected, the first
cases occurred in the village on 8th April. Here the presumption is that the
rats came from New Kurla and carried the disease with them.
In all other instances which I have investigated, we find a distinct history
of the introduction of the disease by human intercourse.
In most places as in Kurla, Bassein, Chembur, Trombay, Malád, Chinchni,
Thána, Bhiwndi, Bhayndar, &c., we have a history of persons coming sick from
an infected locality or falling sick a clay or two after their arrival prior to the
occurrence of local cases.
In other instances we find the disease introduced by persons themselves in
good health coming from an infected locality.
In Agáshi the first local case occurred in the person of a Shimpi woman, to
whose house some friends from Bombay had come to live. None of these
Bombay people were sick or were afterwards attacked.