Filariasis and Elephantiasis: You Can’t Go Home Again

Abstract

There is a small town—actually it was then little more than a large village—called Pondok Tanjung in the state of Perak in Peninsular Malaysia. In the late 1970s it was a one street town fringed by orderly rows of rubber trees which reached out to the surrounding jungle, but even then the town already had a desultory look about it as production of natural rubber had slowly started to decline under the global onslaught of developments in the synthetic rubber industry (Fig. 6.1). The Malaysian economy by then was moving away from relying exclusively on primary production of commodities such as rubber, palm oil and mining and turning towards manufacturing in light industries like apparel, electronics and household goods. Pondok Tanjung was therefore in transition from a boomtown in the 1960s when commodity prices were high, and becoming an abandoned ghost town bypassed by new industrial parks in the outskirts of the larger towns in Perak State like Taiping and Ipoh, which had better infrastructure and transportation to the major export oriented ports. I was born and raised in Taiping just hardly 20 km away, yet I had not known about Pondok Tanjung until after I had started to do research in lymphatic filariasis. In one of the great ironies of my life, it turned out that Pondok Tanjung had the dubious distinction of having the highest prevalence of lymphatic filariasis in the country during that period in the 1970s.