Health in the Army
White-haired, hale & healthy Major General Norman T. Kirk, since June head of the Army's huge (90,000 officers, 450,000 enlisted men) Medical Corps, last fortnight told Manhattan newspapermen that the U.S. Army is haler & healthier than any army has ever been in any war. Some of his specific points on Medical Corps problems, solved and unsolved:
> Malaria is still the No. 1 worry. Though quinine is low, there is plenty of the synthetic substitute, atabrine. But if a man is bitten by the wrong kind of mosquito he will probably get chills and fever when he stops taking drugs, even if he is safely out of the malaria region. Therefore the best way to prevent malaria is to prevent disease-carrying mosquitoes from breeding and biting. In jungle fighting, where mosquitoes are harder to keep at bay than the Japs, the malaria rate is high: e.g., in the Southwest Pacific, two malaria casualties were flown to the rear for every wound casualty. The men were temporarily disabled for fighting, but only 16 died. Italy, the General pointed out, is heavily infected with malaria.
> One of the worst bugbears of World War I was gas bacillus infection, which often meant an amputation, if not death. In North Africa the Army had only twelve cases and one death. Reasons: 1) the African soil is not as heavily manured as France's, hence is freer from bacteria; 2) the wounded now get excellent surgery to remove the dead flesh in which the gas bacillus grows, and get it quickly.
> The Army's yellow fever inoculations are now satisfactory. Cause of the mysterious jaundice which followed many of last year's inoculations against yellow fever (TIME, Aug. 3) has never been discovered; but there has been no more jaundice since laboratories stopped making vaccine from human serum.
> When sanitation is not ideal and flies are thick, e.g., when troops move into a new area, soldiers may get bacillary dysentery, a violent intestinal infection and a quick killer. The Army now treats the disease with sulfaguanidine, cures the boys in four or five days.
> Scrub typhus is the Army's name for a new disease which occurs both in Africa and the Southwest Pacific area. Army laboratories are working on it. So far the Medical Corps knows only that 1) the scrub typhus organism is carried by mites from rodents to humans; 2) it produces a severe toxin which acts chiefly on the heart muscles; 3) mortality is lower than from true typhus.
> An unspecified number of U.S. war casualties* are psychiatric. In General Kirk's own experience as head of Percy Jones Hospital in Battle Creek, Mich., about 85% of the psychiatric casualties had a history of instability in civil life. The Army, he said, would be spared much trouble and expense if draft boards would get a man's full record before shipping him off to an induction center. Said he: "The idea that the Army is making the boys crazy is not so. It's just finding out those that are." (The War Department last week announced that WACS would soon be assigned to local boards to take down case histories as an aid to induction-center weeding out.)
> In World War I evacuation hospitals (portable hospitals behind the lines where a wounded man is first operated on) mortality of wound cases was about 15%. In U.S. North African evacuation hospitals, the rate was only 2 1/4 to 3 1/2%, because of blood plasma transfusions, excellent surgery and sulfa drugs to prevent infection.
> A new type of wound is causing many amputations: land mines damage legs and feet of men afoot or riding in trucks or jeeps. The Navy has many similar wounds among men standing on deck just above a torpedo burst--the effect of the deck concussion is the same as though a man landed on his feet from a 40-ft. fall.
> In the last fiscal year the Army bought $270,000,000 worth of medical supplies, seme of them for Lend-Lease. Worst problem: surgical instruments. The U.S. used to import 90% of its scalpels, retractors, needles, surgical shears and saws, now makes them at home. But priority trouble sometimes causes a six-month lag between an order for instruments and delivery.
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