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15. The jemadar of camels told me he thought that No. 8/79 suffered from a disease
different from the others because he had been so long ill, and had never refused food,
whereas the others fed irregularly and lost condition much more rapidly. The five
were wretchedly thin. No. 8/79 was rather thinner than the others. On examining
the mucous membranes I found the first four on the list presented the characteristic
appearance of surra in horses—yellow with petechiae; but No. 8/79 had petechiae
without the yellowness ; he was more blanched ; his eyes were dry, the others wept.
Neither of them had dropsical swellings, and I was told they had not had any
previously. On examining the blood by the microscope, I found the parasites of surra
in countless numbers, and very active in the first four, but not one in No. 8/79 I
examined many drops of his blood, and failed to find one. He had in his blood what
I did not find in the others, the embryos of a filaria which appeared to me to answer
exactly to the description given by Dr. Lewis in his monograph on the filaria
sanguinis hominis. About 10 or 12 were present in every small drop of blood. I did
not find these in the horse, except in one case suffering from surra with the surra
parasite—I found one single specimen. I have submitted these to Dr. Lewis, but he
has not yet had time to determine whether they are exactly the same as those found
in man or not: he is inclined to think that they are a little different.* The urine
of each of these camels was quite normal in appearance.
16. Post mortem camel No. 8/79.—There was no abnormal amount of serum in the
peritoneal cavity, and no fluff of lymph such as 1 found in surra horses. The organs
were all perfectly healthy. Intestines opened and examined throughout, and found
perfectly healthy. But, in the right ventricle of the heart and in the pulmonary
arteries, I found tangled masses of filaria several inches long, which I suppose to be
the mature form of the embryos which 1 had found by the microscope. I have had
no time yet to examine them in detail, neither has Dr. Lewis, to whom I have sub-
mitted specimens; but they are certainly thicker than the single specimen of the
mature filaria sanguinis which he found in man.
17. On the 9th October, camel No. 61/80 was destroyed (by bleeding, the same as
the other); and, post mortem, I found a large quantity of very clear serum effused both
in the peritoneal cavity and in the pericardial sack, just as I found in surra horses;
but there was no fluff of lymph on the parietal peritoneum. The organs were all
perfectly healthy. The surra parasite lived longer, by several hours, in the blood of
this camel after it was drawn from the body, than I found it doing in the blood of
horses.
18. I was informed that the 4th Sikhs have lost the following numbers of camels
during the past three years, and " with two or three exceptions, they are all supposed
to have died from surra " :—
In 1878 there died 29 camels,
„ 1879 „
„ 41
„
„ 1880 „
„ 28
„
and there were ten on the sick list for it in October.
19. It is a subject for consideration whether many of the camels which wasted
away and died on our frontier in the Transport service during the late war suffered
from surra.
20. Nawab Khan, the camel jemadar of the 3rd Punjab Infantry, has the
reputation of knowing more about camels than anybody else in the district, and he
communicated to me the following information, as interpreted by Major Money,
4th Punjab Cavalry:—
21. " The prevailing opinion among the natives in this district is, that surra is
caused by the bite of a large brown fly (the size of a small bee) called bhura dhang.
In the month of May that fly comes from the ground in jungle-land that has been
under water. In June and July the flies are very numerous and in full force ; about the
15th of August they begin to diminish, and early in October they are obtained with
difficulty. The fly bites horned cattle and donkeys, but they suffer no ill effects ; it
bites men, and a painful swelling follows ; it bites horses and camels, and gives them a
* A new species fully described by Lewis, and called Filaria Evansi , in the Proceedings Asiatic Society of Bengal,
March 1882.