Influenza Germ Found?

Currently there are slightly less diphtheria, infantile paralysis, measles and typhoid in the U. S. than at this period last year, and slightly more meningitis, scarlet fever. Smallpox also has increased considerably in 1929. But very few U. S. people now die of smallpox. During the last week of November, when the U. S. Public Health Service last compiled statistics, there was not one smallpox death reported in the entire country. At the same period there were 676 deaths from influenza and pneumonia, much less than last year.

This relatively light incidence of influenza has not, however, abated fear of and interest in this respiratory disease. When the University of Chicago officially announced that its Isidore Sydney Falk had isolated the causative germ, the Streptococcus polymorphous (TIME, Dec. 23), the news spread with the celerity of a political or murder despatch. From London Dr. David Thomson, who has worked on the same problem, said: "Proving that one has discovered the true germ of influenza is in reproducing the disease in man or in animals by this germ in pure cultures . . . this is a very important part of the American's discovery."

However, Dr. Morris Fishbein, editor of the American Medical Association's Journal, with his usual salutary skepticism, editorialized: "With little if any apparent warrant, it is again announced, for at least the tenth time in five years, that the causative organism of influenza has been discovered and that it is hoped to prepare a vaccine. There is thus far little or no evidence in scientific medical literature, or even in spoken addresses, to indicate that I. S. Falk, Ph.D., and his associates have progressed any further toward the solution of this problem than have workers in other parts of the world, now or in the past."

Reported Dr. Falk: "All I can say is that I made my report before the Bacteriology Club of the University of Chicago and the evidence will shortly be in print in more detailed form."

Supplemented Dr. William Hallock Park, Manhattan's great bacteriologist: "... A very thoughtful piece of work, whether or not he has found the influenza germ."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.