KOLKATA: A hundred years before the use of pathogen-preventive masks burst onto the public consciousness with the appearance of the Covid pandemic, a Kolkata doctor had written extensively about the significance of masks in preventing infectious diseases, and had even described, in a manual, how to make such a mask.
It was only recently that officials at the Administrator General and Official Trustee of West Bengal (AGOTWB) office stumbled upon the manual, titled ‘Hygiene and Public Health’, penned by Jahar Lal Das in 1919, even as the Spanish flu was raging across the globe.
