Omelets in Persia

The whole Iranian army has been vaccinated--against typhus fever. The ambitious project is the work of a U.S. Army surgeon, Colonel Abraham Neuwirth, who has been tackling one unprecedented epidemiological problem after another at Teheran.

When chunky, fast-talking Dr. Neuwirth reached Iran last May to become medical adviser to the Government, swarms of Polish refugees from Russia were pouring into the country--unwashed, lousy, probably infected with typhus. Iranians feared an epidemic. At Teheran's Pasteur Institute, Dr. Neuwirth taught Iranian technicians to manufacture typhus vaccine by the new Cox egg-culture method.* Dr. Neuwirth vaccinated thousands of Iranians where typhus threatened, induced the Government to order compulsory vaccination of the whole army--some 200,000 soldiers. (No vaccine against typhus gives sure-fire protection, but vaccination helps.)

Next to typhus, Iran's biggest menace is leishmania, a mysteriously infectious disease (causing extreme enlargement of spleen and liver, and grey pigmentation of the skin) which kills thousands of natives (who call it kala azar or "black disease"). Leishmania in another form leaves thousands of survivors scarred by disfiguring

"Bagdad boils." On leishmania vaccine, Dr. Neuwirth ran into a new difficulty. Iran is not rich in chickens, and he could not find enough eggs to make the quantities of leishmania vaccine he needed. So he ground up chick embryos, watered them down with a saline solution and added this to an ordinary culture medium. The vaccine develops nicely in this egg-stimulated solution, and a few eggs go a long way. Dr. Neuwirth is now testing his leishmania vaccine on 200 Iranian moppets, hoping if the treatment succeeds to save thousands from death or disfigurement.

Dr. Neuwirth is also using the egg-culture method in an attempt to produce the world's first vaccine against trachoma, an infectious eye disease common throughout the Middle East; and he is trying to develop a bacteriophage ("bacteria-eater") solution to treat those already afflicted. Last month the Iranian Government gave Dr. Neuwirth its first scientific decoration.

* Dr. Herald R. Cox of the U.S. Public Health Service cultivates vaccines inside half-incubated eggs rather than in living animals.

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