Again, Infantile Paralysis

Four weeks ago the U. S. Public Health Service had record of only 21 new cases of infantile paralysis through the breadth of the land. Week later a student of St. Mark's School at Southboro, Mass, sickened with the disease. Others showed preliminary symptoms. Alarmed parents, among them some of the most intelligent as well as the most wealthy in the land, hustled their sons away from where they thought death and paralysis lurked. Last week Headmaster Francis Parkman had only 20 of his 196 enrolled boys remaining under his supervision. These were kept under quarantine.

By last week one St. Mark's boy, Frederick William Hubbell of the fourth generation of a wealthy Des Moines real estate and insurance family was dead of infantile paralysis. Seventeen other St. Mark's boys were known to be stricken, eight of them after they were removed from school. All are suspected of having taken an unseasonable swim, like paralyzed Franklin Roosevelt, in chilly water. Four of the seventeen showed some degree of paralysis. How many other children were taken sick last week in other schools and homes where public inquisitiveness pried less sharply, will not be known for about a month when medical reports will have traveled to Washington. Enough was known last week for U. S. Public Health Service men to mark the St. Mark's epidemic down as the season's first general outbreak. It was also notably premature, since infantile paralysis is a hot weather disease.

Last summer no reliable results came from anti-paralysis preventive vaccines (TIME, Sept. 9). This summer the U. S. Public Health Service and the Rockefeller Institute suggest spraying the nostrils with 4% sodium alum or tannic acid solution five or six days in succession in alternate weeks. This treatment toughens nasal membranes, definitely protects monkeys, at least does no harm to humans.

In Chicago's Passavant Memorial Hospital last week lay Philip Danforth Armour IV, great-grandson of the packing house founder, with a light attack of infantile paralysis. A few miles away lay lightly stricken his distant cousin, Charles Armour, in his own Lake Forest home. Both contracted the disease presumably at St. Mark's, whence their parents snatched them last month at first word of epidemic. To a hospital room next to their son went Philip Danforth Armour III and his wife Gwendolin. Said the mother: "It is worth the risk to stay near him." Fourteen years ago Philip IV. then 5, and his sister Gwendolin, then 6, were stricken with an undiagnosed infection. The little girl died.

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