In Mothers' Milk

Because polio is usually a warm-weather disease of temperate zones, doctors jumped at the chance to study a polio outbreak two winters ago among Eskimos at deep-frozen Chesterfield Inlet, in Canada's Northwest Territories just below the Arctic Circle. One striking fact was soon evident: though infants under three got polio just as older children and adults did, none of the infants suffered the devastating paralytic stage of the disease. And the infants up to three years old, following local Eskimo custom, were still being nursed at their mothers' breasts.*

The coincidence was so striking that Dr. Albert B. Sabin of the Children's Hospital Research Foundation in Cincinnati followed it up. Last week Dr. Sabin told the Society of American Bacteriologists, meeting in Baltimore, that he had discovered the existence of a factor in human milk which seems to make the polio virus less active. The substance (its nature is still unknown) was found in all human milk samples taken within the first five days of milk flow after childbirth. It was found in three-fourths of the samples taken in the next eleven months.

So far, Dr. Sabin has tested the anti-polio properties of the substance on nothing but mice. Two groups of mice were given doses of human polio virus calculated to cause paralysis. One group of mice got the virus straight and became paralyzed. The others got the virus along with milk, and these did not become ill at all.

There was no assurance that Dr. Sabin's discovery would bring relief to human victims of infantile paralysis, but it was one more promising lead.

* Among Eskimo tribes elsewhere, older children are occasionally breastfed. Explorer Peter Freuchen saw an Eskimo mother in Greenland nursing a full-grown son.

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