Reports and notes of the Public Health Laboratories, Cairo. No. 1, 1917.

Date:
1918
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Reports and notes of the Public Health Laboratories, Cairo. No. 1, 1917. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    16/144 (page 6)
    Se Ly ee It is worthy of note that a similar examination of the blood of thirty of the inhabitants of the Oasis of Bahartya taken at night also gave a completely negative result. The ‘strangely irregular distribution of filarial infection has been observed in other countries,,. but is at present quite unexplained. Low (‘ Journal of Trop. Med. and Hygiene”) examined the blood, taken at night, of a large number of the inhabitants of different islands in the West Indies and was struck by the great, variability in the amount of filarial disease in the different islands. Thus, in St. Kitts, 32°8 per cent of the population was found to be infected with filaria nocturna ; in Barbadoes 12-6 per cent ; in Trinidad 10-7 per cent ; in Dominica 7°6 per cent ; in St. Vincent 6 per cent and in both Greniias and Carriacon 0 per oats Bahr (< Parasitology,” vol. 7, 1914-1915, p. 128) notes that it is a matter of common observation in Ceylon that elephantiasis 1s definitely limited to certain areas, and that in the endemic areas the topographical distribution of microfilarie in the blood is apparently of a most capricious character, some of the villages having at least 26 per cent of the inhabitants infected, while neigh- bouring villages are quite free from the parasite and its associated diseases. The same observer (“« Filariasis and Elephantiasis in Fiji,” London, 1912, p. 8) found that this was also the case in the Fiji Islands. As our observations were only concerned with the dieeibenee of the infection, no special attention was paid to the critical examination of the parasite. The morphological appearances of the microfilarize and the character of the periodicity corresponded with those of the micro- filarize of filaria Bancrofti, but without an examination of the parent worms a definite identifi- cation would not be justifiable. Elephantiasis has been known in Kgypt from a very early date. Lucretius (De Rerum Natura, “of the elephant disease which is generated beside the streams of Nile in the midst of Egypt and nowhere else, ” and Lane-Poole (“Story of Cairo,” London, 1906) states that ‘Abd el ‘Aziz, son of the caliph Marwan, bought the monastery at Tamweyh from the monks and went there in order to be cured of elephantiasis in the sulphur springs of Helwan about the end of the seventh century. The Arabian physicians of the ninth and tenth centuries described a disease ‘‘ Da-el fil’’ (the elephant disease). It is probable, however, that this expression ’ covered both elephantiasis and leprosy. The Mediterranean littoral of Egypt and particularly the ports of Damietta and Rosetta have long been known as centres of the disease, and the cases of elephantiasis seen at Qasr el ‘Aini hospital in Cairo usually come from one of these two towns. So far as we are aware,no information is available as to the extent of filarial infection in these 5 districts, but it is certain that an investigation of these areas would yield most interesting results. In December 1910 we paid a short visit to Damietta and in the course of three days were able to see thirty-four cases of elephantiasis, some of which were in a very advanced condition. Unfor- tunately, it was not possible at the time to make any blood examination in the neighbourhood. It is probable that investigation would reveal the presence of endemic foci of the disease in other parts of Egypt, as microfilarix are occasionally met with in the blood of individuals who’ have not lived in localities known to be endemically infected. Thus, in December 1910, with a view to seeing if filarial infection was common in Cairo, the blood of thirty-eight patients and attendants in the Cairo Fever Hospital were taken at night and examined for microfilariz. The specimens were all negative with the exception of two, both of which were from hospital attendants. It is interesting that these two infected men came from the village of Abnib (Asyat mudiriya), where they inhabited adjoining houses. It is most desirable that information should be collected with a view to extending our knowledge of the distribution of filaria in Egypt, and probably the most hopeful method of rapidly detecting foci of the infection would be the collection of information throughout the country as to the existence of cases of elephantiasis, as the occurrence of these cases will probably be found to centre round certain infected districts, and the existence ofthe endemic filarial infection could then be proved Munro’s translation) speaks