Disease Down the Ages

GOA'S Health Minister Dr Suresh Amonkar remarked at a function in June 2001 that malaria is not new to Goa and that it prevailed even during the colonial times. This makes us look back in time and see what the situation was like during the olden times.

Shuffling the pages of history, we are able to confirm that diseases did strike once too often and claimed not just a few lives but sometimes in thousands in the good or bad old days. In Europe, it was even said that out of the hundreds who sailed to India, very few returned. Many even failed to reach India. Of course, there must have been many who did not wish to return to their native country too.

Says M N Pearson in The New Cambridge History of India (1990), "Casualties in the endless skirmishes with Malabaris and others were often substantial. Cholera and malaria also took their toll; one estimate claims that from 1604 to 1634, 25,000 soldiers died in the Royal Hospital in Goa. Of these, according to another and perhaps fanciful account, at least 500 a year died of syphilis, and the 'effects of profligacy'."

A list compiled by Pedro Barreto de Rezende for the years 1629 to 1634 shows that of the total of 5228 men leaving Portugal for India, only 2495 managed to reach Goa. Of course, it was not always disease that reduced the numbers of the arrivals because some of those leaving Lisbon, deserted the ships and quite often even the ships were lost during the voyage.

Pearson also wrote that royal mortality was a rough indicator of death rates in the sixteenth-century Portugal. "Of 50 governors, up to 1656, 22 died during their term of office, or while on the way home after it, and another died with D Sebastian at El-Ksar el-Kebir…The Royal Hospital did the best it could and was often held up as a model by visitors, despite its appalling mortality rate."

"More often European and Asian medicine (or quackery) coexisted. The practice in the famous Royal Hospital in Goa show this. European patients would be bled frequently to cure their illness, and then, to restore their colour, they were prescribed a glass of cow urine three times a day."

Over the centuries, medicine and health care has improved by leaps and bounds. Barring just a few serious diseases, the rest can be cured today with the aid of modern medicines. Hence, we cannot quote the centuries-old figures to justify the presence of malaria in Goa in the year 2001. The disease, which has spread particularly through the influx of upcountry labour used in the construction work, has been controlled to a large extent but its total eradication eludes us still. The situation in the South Goa village of Uguem has been quite disturbing, with several cases of malaria registered this year.