SANITATION AND HYGIENE ON TROPICAL ESTATES 8/ 



best way. Others see that proper meals are cooked and 

 consumed. Whatever system is carried out it should be 

 part of the manager's duty to attend to this, and in no 

 case will it fail to benefit the labourer and increase the 

 returns to the estate from the labour force. 



These few notes are hurriedly put together in the hope 

 that our experiences may be useful to those engaged in 

 plantation work in the tropics. Effort has been made to 

 use the simplest language and avoid technical terms, and 

 only a few of the most important points have been men- 

 tioned; but if these few points are recognized and 

 adequately dealt with by the planter, many costly evils 

 can be definitely prevented. 



As mentioned earlier in this paper, malaria is one of 

 the greatest scourges of the tropics, and it is particularly 

 severe in the Malay States. With the growth of the 

 planting industry and the consequent introduction of 

 Tamil labour from Southern India, the effects of malaria 

 became so marked as to call for special activity on 

 the part of Government. Death-rates on some very 

 malarious estates rose at times to as much as 500 and 

 600 per 1,000 per annum. Government insisted through 

 the Health Department on many expensive sanitary 

 reforms and general measures, and these, as stated, have 

 been successful in reducing abnormally high death-rates, 

 but have had less marked effect on malarial sickness. 



On the flat lands near the coast agricultural improve- 

 ment of the land, coupled with the housing of coolies 

 some distance from undrained jungle, as persistently 

 advocated by Dr. Watson and others, had the desired 

 result of practically abolishing malaria, but in the hill- 

 lands these measures produced no results, and the reason 

 for this will appear later. Towns situated in hill-land 

 have also suffered severely, and from time to time various 

 measures have been tried without much benefit. This 

 was not in most cases due to the wrong advice of medical 

 officers, but to the lack of thoroughness in carrying their 

 advice to a logical conclusion, and a few years ago the 

 attitude of authority was to view malaria as an unfor- 

 tunate but unavoidable evil in hill-land. 



