Bacteriologists

Disease, death, disappointment and a great deal of hope stirred the meeting of the Society of American Bacteriologists in Manhattan last week. President Karl Friederich Meyer could not attend. Director and bacteriologist of University of California's Hooper Foundation, Professor Meyer, 51, lay ill with parrot fever, which he had contracted while studying that disease.

Anna M. Pabst, 39, bacteriologist with the U. S. Public Health Service in Washington, was to read a paper at the New York meeting proving the impossibility of testing anti-meningitis serum on rabbits and guinea pigs. Night before her appearance she died of meningitis contracted when a guinea pig, into whose head she was injecting virulent meningitis germs, jerked out of her hands. The meningitis germs squirted into Miss Pabst's eye, sped to her brain, killed her in eight days, earned her a medical martyr's kudos.

From Washington Senior Surgeon James Payton Leake of the U. S. Public Health Service raised a loud clamor against the infantile paralysis vaccines developed in Manhattan by Drs. William Hallock Park & Maurice Brodie, in Philadelphia by Dr. John Kolmer (TIME, July 16, 1934 et seq.). Twelve children who received one or the other of the vaccines last summer rapidly contracted the disease. Of the twelve, six died. Said Dr. Leake: "I feel that the fact we found fatalities makes it advisable that we warn the public and physicians."

Drs. Brodie and Kolmer protested that the dead children must have been exposed to infantile paralysis before getting full protective doses of their respective vaccines. Nonetheless. New York City's Department of Health stopped vaccinating children with the Park-Brodie serum. Smugly Keith Morgan, vice president of Georgia Warm Springs Foundation, denied that his organization had supplied any money for the disputed infantile paralysis vaccines.

On the cheerful side of the infantile paralysis problem, Claus W. Jungeblut of Columbia University declared: "Although it is premature to draw any definite conclusions from this preliminary report, there seems to be a strong probability that Vitamin C, when injected in the proper dose, possesses distinct therapeutic power in experimental poliomyelitis."

And so much success did Albert B. Sabin, Peter Kosciusko Olitsky & Harold R. Cox of the Rockefeller Institute have from spraying weak solutions of tannic acid or alum into the nostrils of monkeys that they boldly urged "a trial in man of these chemicals in the prevention of poliomyelitis during epidemics."

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