Radio to the Rescue

It was time for dinner, but Fred von Rekowsky, New York City "ham" radio operator, was determined not to turn off his set until he found out what the distant voice was trying to say. It seemed to want "New York only." The static was bad, but through it he caught a murmur of soft English: "Emergency . . . to try and save a child's life . . ."

Rekowsky forgot about his dinner.

He tried to get through to the murmuring voice: no luck. But a new voice came in strong: a fellow amateur in Clewiston, Fla. had caught the emergency message. By relay, Rekowsky pieced out a story from Oporto, Portugal.

There, a man named Ilidio Carlos Medina dos Santos had just read in his newspaper that a new drug, Varidase, might be just the thing for tuberculous meningitis. He wanted some, fast, for his little daughter Branca Maria.

Branca Maria, 9, had been ill of tuberculous meningitis since April. At first, streptomycin seemed to help her, but lately even this had begun to fail her and she was wasting away rapidly, unable to keep food down. Her father knew nothing of the controversy among medical experts about the value of Varidase, a mixture of two enzymes, streptokinase and streptodornase (TIME, March 12), in her type of illness. He was ready to try anything.

In New York, Operator von Rekowsky (a lithographer when he is not at his set) got busy. A wholesale drug supplier furnished a single vial of Varidase; it was hustled to Idlewild airport. Within six hours of the message from Oporto, the vial was on its way to London on an Israeli airlines plane; within a few more hours, a BOAC airliner set it down in Lisbon. Father Santos was waiting, hurried home with the vial in a Portuguese military plane.

An Oporto doctor gave Branca Maria an injection of Varidase, and waited to see what would happen. (The theory is that the enzymes help to dissolve clotted pus, enable an antibiotic such as streptomycin to go to work on the germs without interference.) Within 45 minutes, Branca Maria took some food and kept it down. It was too early for the doctor to tell whether the usually fatal disease was being arrested. But Santos flew back to Lisbon, picked up a dozen more vials of Varidase to keep up the treatments. Said he: "God bless radio and aviation. Whatever happens, this has shown that there is still a love of humanity in our world."

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