Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
later, the Truxillo Railroad Company's medical department attended to
some 4,600 cases of malaria. The company's medical department imple-
mented a malaria prevention program that included weekly applications
of crude oil and insecticides ''in all of the camps'' and along the banks of
rivers, streams and swampy areas.
50
In addition, the company distributed
tens of thousands of quinine tablets and Plasmochin.
The annual reports issued by United Fruit's Medical Department in-
dicate that the type of work most often associated with malaria during the
1920s was land-clearing, a pattern that had less to do with the ''pestilen-
tial'' nature of the woodlands than with the provisional nature of worker
housing.
51
In an article published in 1926,William Deeks, a physician em-
ployed by the United Fruit Company, concluded that his research in Hon-
duras demonstrated that ''the house is a factor of primary importance in
the acquisition and spread of malaria.''
52
This awareness did little for the
workers contracted to clear land, who were forced to sleep in hastily built
structures with manaca (palm-thatched) roofs. Feliciano Núñez recalled
swarms of mosquitoes hovering above his hammock when he worked
for a contractor clearing forests in the Aguán valley in the early 1930s.
Not surprisingly, he came down with malaria. Through the 1940s, land-
clearingcrewscontinuedtobehousedincrowdedstructuresthatafforded
little protection from mosquitoes.
53
Even as the fruit companies waged
multi-pronged campaigns to bring malaria under control, their practice
of relocating production locations in response to Panama disease placed
workers in high-risk environments. Shifting plantation agriculture then,
depended not only upon the availability of land but also upon men and
women who were willing to work in places that heightened their chances
of contracting malaria.
Beyond mosquitoes, perhaps no other non-human inhabitant of ba-
nanaplantationsinspiredasmuchdreadamongfieldworkersasthebarba
amarilla(Bothropsatrox),avenomoussnakewithabrightyellowchinand
a reputation amongcampeñosas an unusuallyaggressive serpent.The bite
of abarbaamarillacould produce temporary blindness, bleeding, paraly-
sis and, if untreated, death. In the mid-1920s, concern over snakebites
promptedUnitedFruittosupportstudiesofthebarbaamarillaincollabo-
ration with the Antivenin Institute of America and Harvard University's
Museum of Comparative Zoology.
54
The company helped to establish a
serpentarium near Tela where snakes could be studied and bred for pur-
poses of extracting the venom needed to produce antiserum. The preva-
lence of snakebites among plantation workers is unclear; United Fruit's
Medical Department reported a handful of life-threatening cases each
