Page:Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, volume 2 (3).djvu/30

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134 DISCUSSION

could get some different animal that was susceptible we could then define the exact life-cycle of the parasite. The bug might after all not be a true intermediate host, though at present everything pointed to the fact that it was.

Sir Havelock Charles, after congratulating Captain Patton on the able and lucid manner in which he had brought the subject before them, said there was one point on which he desired to gain a little light. The question was, the relationship between Oriental sore and kala-azar. Dr. Sambon had taken practically as proven that a close relationship existed. He (Sir H. Charles) had had considerable experience on the North-west frontier of India, in Persia, Turkestan and Beluchistan. He had lived amongst camel-drivers in a camp of 2,000 to 3,000 camels. He had treated natives for Oriental sore and also Europeans, and had seen a great deal of it. He had also seen it on the North-west frontier of India. Throughout the whole of the time he had been in these districts, and for twelve years in the Punjab, he had never seen one case of kala-azar. Subsequently, in Lower Bengal he saw plenty of it. On the frontier of India camels were in abundance ; in Rajputana and in the Punjab they were very numerous ; yet kala-azar did not exist there. In Lower Bengal (which is not a country for the camel, for it cannot live there) kala-azar was abundant. This state of things, he thought, obtained in Madras. Now, as Dr. Low pertinently pointed out, if there were a relationship between the parasites — if the one disease were the cause of the other — then wherever Oriental sore existed there we should also find kala-azar.

Dr. Wenyon said there were one or two points in connection with these flagellates which were of interest