Chicago Calls the Doctor

Like a vigorous man who seldom bothers with doctors, Chicago suddenly decided that it was time for a periodic checkup. It asked the U.S. Public Health Service to give it a thorough going-over. For a year, a group of Government experts tested the city's blood, held a stethoscope to its heart, squinted appraisingly at its South Side. Last week, having finished the examination, the doctors were gravely writing it up for the patient in a 2,000-page report. Chicago, they had found, is a none too healthy city.

Two-thirds of Chicago's drinking water supply is nothing but chlorinated (unfiltered) water from Lake Michigan, which is also used for sewage disposal. The city law requiring pasteurization of ice cream and frozen desserts, the investigators found, is laxly enforced. Private scavengers still collect about one-third of the city's refuse and deposit it in four fly-ridden, ratinfested, unregulated dumps.

Chicago, said the U.S.P.H.S., is too hospitable to rats. City laws forbid public exterminators to spread loose poison on private premises. But private exterminators work only in and immediately around buildings. That leaves a "no man's land'' in every backyard, which the rats have been quick to discover.

More than 100,000 homes in Chicago, said the U.S.P.H.S., are unfit for human habitation. What's more startling, there are more than 4,000 privies inside the city limits.

There is a desperate shortage of nurses. According to current standards (one public health nurse per 2,000 population), there should be 2,206 nurses in Cook County. There are only 649.

With a winning bedside manner, the doctors also found a few things right about Chicago. In control of venereal diseases and infant mortality, the city ranks with the nation's best.

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