Egyptian Plague

In the Nile Valley, which teems with many strange forms of lower animal life, lives a terrifying snail. It spreads a parasitic disease, schistosomiasis, which has afflicted Egyptians since the Pharaohs; the parasite's eggs have been found in preserved human viscera 3,000 years old. For the past five years, a hardbitten, stubborn-jawed, 70-year-old U.S. doctor named Claude Heman Barlow has worked mightily to deliver Egyptians from this ancient plague. His specialty: killing snails.

Schistosomiasis, caused by a tiny blood fluke which burrows under the skin of river bathers, causes fever, hives, bladder infection, sometimes cirrhosis of the liver. The parasite has a complicated life cycle: its eggs, hatching in warm water, develop larvae which enter snails, there develop to a second, man-attacking larval stage called cercariae or flukes. A single snail may produce 32,000 flukes.

After burrowing into a human victim, the flukes mature in the liver, cuddle up in pairs, migrate to small blood vessels in the bladder or large bowel wall, mate, lay eggs, start a new cycle. It begins when the eggs are discharged in urine or faeces, are picked up by the snails again.

Purging the Nile. The most vulnerable point in this cycle, reasoned Dr. Barlow, is the snail; if the snails were killed the young larvae would soon die and the cycle would be broken. Barlow, an old China hand (21 years a Baptist medical missionary) and longtime Rockefeller Foundation hookworm researcher in Egypt, retired five years ago to devote himself, as an Egyptian Government health officer, to snail extermination. Weapon: a copper sulphate purge, dumped into the Nile and its network of canals.

So far, Dr. Barlow and some 7,000 helpers have cleared the snails from waters irrigating 1,000,000 of Egypt's 6,000,000 acres.

Dr. Barlow has long brooded on the possibility that Schistosomiasis might get a foothold in the U.S. The disease is widely prevalent in Asia, South & Central America, infected 1,633 GIs in the Philippines. Question: Is there a U.S. snail which could harbor the parasite? Two years ago, Dr. Barlow decided on a sacrificial investigation. Infecting himself with Egyptian flukes (220 of them, by a count of stings), he hastened to Washington, urged Public Health Service officials to let him turn his schistosomes loose in snail-populated waters to see whether they could thrive in the U.S. Officials recoiled in horror, told him to stick to the laboratory.

Fighting the Fluke. Dr. Barlow's recovery was long and painful. He ran a high fever, was so full of schistosome eggs that doctors cut nests of them out of his flesh. Last week, although the standard tartar emetic treatment* had rid him of most of his flukes, he noted that: "There is still no time, day or night, when I am not in pain."

But the doctor (back in Egypt) had the satisfaction of knowing that the U.S. Army, Navy, Public Health Service and several universities were now studying schistosomiasis. Proving a theory long held by Dr. Barlow, two P.H.S. doctors had discovered (in the laboratory) that there is, indeed, at least one U.S. snail (Louisiana variety) which can harbor the Egyptian fluke, schistosoma mansoni.

*Nerve block anesthesia was invented in 1885 at Johns Hopkins by famed Surgeon William Stewart Halsted. He used cocaine injections, in the course of experiments on himself became a coccaine addict. Development of Halsted's discovery was long delayed.

*Injections of potassium antimony tartrate every other day for a month.

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