Drainage and Malaria

Abstract

IN India, the sanitary expert adviser of the complacent type must either “bend or break” under the weight of official opinion (held as strongly by the youngest Undersecretary as the veteran Financial Member) that the Sanitary Department must be classed financially as “unproductive,” and must therefore be, in its representations involving expense, tactfully unobtrusive. Hence, possibly, the unconscious evolution of the policy of “quinine prophylaxis,”which would relieve the Government of India from applications for loans and “free grants” for radical anti-malarial measures, such as drainage works, requiring the sinking of capital, and would throw upon the inhabitants of malarious areas (who are notoriously impecunious as a sequence of disability to labour) the onus of purchasing an expensive drug—through an indefinite number of years.