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The Antimony Treatment of Kala-Azar

Abstract

THE progress during the last quarter of a century, due to many workers, in the treatment of the deadly kala-azar of north-east India and the Mediterranean basin has not attracted the attention it deserves. The epidemic form spread two hundred miles up the Brahmaputra Valley in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, with a case mortality of 90 per cent, and it caused a reduction of 31·5 per cent in the population of the Nowgong district in one decade. In 1890 G. M. Giles incorrectly reported kala-azar to be due to hookworms; in 1897 L. Rogers failed to differentiate the fever from malaria, but established a house or site infection, which enabled Dodds-Price to stamp it out of tea estates. The extension of the epidemic to the east was thus checked for two decades, until the influenza outbreak of 1918 caused kala-azar to break out again in the Sibsagar district.

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ROGERS, L. The Antimony Treatment of Kala-Azar. Nature 144, 1003–1004 (1939). https://doi.org/10.1038/1441003a0

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