Healthmobiles

New York City exercised ingenuity last week in diphtheria prevention work. At the suggestion of its Diphtheria Prevention Commission (Morgan Partner Thomas William Lament, president), Health Commissioner Shirley W. Wynne borrowed a half-dozen trucks from the street cleaning department, cleaned them, placarded them with warnings against diphtheria, and advice to use toxin-antitoxins. Aboard each car he loaded a doctor, two nurses and a refrigerator full of toxin-antitoxin. Then these "healthmobiles" rolled forth among the city's millions like itinerant waffle carts. Spectacular, convenient, they "sold" the idea of preparing in July for winter's diphtheria, administered great numbers of immunizing doses, all gratis.

Diphtheria is an acute communicable disease of childhood. Bacilli breed in the throat, cause grey patches to form there, sometimes produce growth of false membranes which block the breathing.

Until 1894 there was no exact method of curing diphtheria. That year the German, Emil A. von Behring, progressing along research lines which Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch had opened, discovered that the poisons which the diphtheria germ gave out stimulated, if injected into an animal, antitoxins in the animal's blood. Such antitoxins, injected into an active case of diphtheria, counteracted the effects of the toxins, cured the disease.

Later Dr. Theobald Smith, of the Rockefeller Institute, found that if a little diphtheria toxin were added to antitoxin the mixture would immunize animals against the disease. At once Dr. William Hallock Park, director of New York City's health department laboratories, and his associate, the late Dr. Abraham Zingher, began to immunize children with the toxin-antitoxin mixture. That mixture is what the "healthmobiles" were administering last week. Three to six months are necessary before immunity is established.