St. Kitt's Thread Worm

A worm as slim as a horse hair has sewn a cloak of fear about the misshapen Negroes of St. Kitt's (St. Christopher Island, among the British West Indies), and patched it with deaths. Over the 65 square miles of the island grief croons. Trading ships scurry from the swash of the Caribbean against Basseterre. A sort of pestilence is on the people. Dozens have died. Last week a white man, Dr. J. J. Pawan, bacteriologist, reached there by Pan-American plane from Port of Spain, Trinidad, and found the deaths due to a filariasis.

Slender nematode worms, three to four inches long, breed in the lymph spaces of the afflicted. Their larvae swarm through the blood stream. The kind prevalent in the West Indies and as far north as Charleston, S. C., crowd to the internal organs during daylight. At night they wriggle among the blood corpuscles until they reach the blood vessels close to the skin. Along comes a mosquito. It sucks a sleeper's blood, and with it some filaria larvae.

The larvae develop within the mosquito. Later the insect bites another human, disgorging at the instant one or more tiny worms. They burrow into the victim, seek out a lymph node, breed. Batches of them snarl themselves in the lymph passages causing inflammation, which blocks the free passage of lymph through the body. It backs up, causing swellings, particularly of the legs and groin in the Antilles. Affected parts grow massy. The skin thickens and crinkles like an elephant's. Hence the name elephantiasis for one aspect of the disease.

Filariasis rarely kills the victim directly. The St. Kitt's deaths were due to superimposed infections. No drug is known which will rid the infected human of the worms or their larvae. All that Dr. Pawan could recommend on St. Kitt's was that the inhabitants prevent mosquitoes, the intermediate hosts of infection, from breeding (by filling or oiling stagnant puddles and pools) and that they screen themselves from bites.

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