Polluted Reservoir

There was not a political germ in the room. Secretary of State George C. Marshall looked at the representatives of 41 nations, including Russia, and remarked dryly: "Thank God, your purpose here, without recriminations, without undue argument, is solely to do good in the world." The 2,000 doctors, scientists and public health officials had gathered in Washington, D.C. to wage biological warfare against a common enemy, tropical disease.

Slowing Malaria. The best news concerned man's No. 1 enemy in the tropics: malaria. Every year, malaria strikes 300,000,000 people, and kills 3,000,000 of them. But with the now common household spray DDT, "it is a safe statement that at least 90% of the malaria of the world can be wiped out in the next ten years, and that's conservative," said Dr. Fred Soper of the Pan American Sanitary Bureau.

Cost: about $280 million, besides what local governments in the tropics spend. But there is a danger of starting a campaign and then running out of money. A medical entomologist in the British colonial service warned: "If work should cease, even for a relatively short time, the vectors [mosquitoes] would return and we would be in the position of having produced a population without natural immunity."

Fears that veterans returning from the Pacific would increase malaria in the U.S. have proved groundless, said Dr. Justin Andrews of the U.S. Public Health Service. Though 30,000 veterans are still drawing disability pay for malaria, there has been only one case of a veteran transmitting malaria to another person.

What could be done about malarial mosquitoes which escape DDT campaigns? Four war-born drugs help their victims, the conference was told: 1) chloroquine, more active than quinine or atabrine, and much less toxic; 2) pentaquine, which has reduced the relapse rate in the vivax form of malaria from 98% to 25%; 3) iso-pentaquine, a variant of pentaquine, so far tried on only 100 cases; 4) Paludrine, which controls vivax malaria with a single dose.

Speedy Worms. There was less good news about another old enemy of man: worms. There are some 2,000,000,000 people in the world and around 2,200,000,000 cases of worm infestation (some people have more than one kind of worms), reported the Rockefeller Institute's Dr. Norman R. Stoll. Most worms thrive in the tropics, home of half the human race, and a reservoir of food and raw materials for the rest of the world.

In one belt extending almost around the world (from East Pacific islands to southeast Asia, equatorial Africa, northeast coast of South America, and up to the Caribbean islands), 189,000,000 people have filariasis, which causes swelling in the lymphoid tissues. About 20,000,000 people have oncocerciasis, which causes blindness when the worms get into the eyes. A new antimony compound called Neostibosan has proved effective against filariasis, and another new drug, hetrazan, against oncocerciasis.

But there was nothing new for schistosomiasis, which attacks the liver and intestines of 114,000,000 people a year, mostly in the tropics. Nor were there any new drugs for the most widespread worm disease, hookworm, which afflicts 457,000,000 people in the world, including 1,000,000 in the U.S. There is, said Dr. Stoll, no ideal drug for any worm disease, and meanwhile the worm population is keeping pace with the human.

* First accurately described by Hippocrates 2,300 years ago.

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