The Spread of Dysentery in a Khasi Village and Its Treatment with Bacteriophage *Read at the Annual Meeting of the Assam Branch of the British Medical Association.

^Sohjarang is a Khasi village in the jungle 12 miles west of the Shillong-Gauhati Road. It consists of 29 houses and 161 inhabitants. The main village has 24 houses clustered on the slopes of a hill and a smaller part consists of 5 houses on a neighbouring hill. This portion is referred to as U. Pher's village. The people of Nongsier are related to families in Sohjarang and, though ten miles separate the two villages, there is frequent intercourse and there is a reasonable probability that, as the villagers affirm, the disease came from Nongsier. Oil Dr. Choudhury's arrival there on the 9th May he found 68 persons actually ill with dysentery; five others had already died. The epidemic seems to have begun on the 25th April and within three days there were eleven cases in seven houses distributed through the village. The epidemic seems divisible into three waves. The first lasting from the 25th April till the 30th April, the second from the 1st May to the 7th May and the third from the 8th May till the occurrence of the last case on the 17th M!ay. In each wave the cases were distributed throughout the village. The disease did not begin at one end of the village and spread to the other nor is there evidence that there was any concentration of cases in adjoining houses. Only two houses, the one occupied by a mission teacher who lives alone and the other by a woman also living by herself, escaped attack in the main village. Three out of five houses escaped in U. Pher's hamlet. The scattered distribution of the cases in each of the three outbursts and^ the absence of any concentration of the cases is against the spread