Disease Detectives

The hundreds of Camp Fire Girls, aged eight to 16, who thronged the four camps around Lake Vera in the foothills of California's Sierra Nevada had a wonderful time. They hiked through the pinewoods, splashed in the little lake, cooked and slept outdoors. Along with sunburned necks and scraped knees, most of them got a few mosquito bites. They were used to that. And after 1,500 girls had scattered to their homes, a few got sick. That was natural, too.

But in August, Director Alexander Langmuir of the U.S. Epidemic Intelligence Service got an alarming phone call in his Atlanta office. It was from the California Department of Public Health. Three of the Camp Fire Girls had come down with malaria, and there was no telling how many more of the 1,500 might have been infected. Somebody had to check all the families and warn hundreds of doctors who normally would never suspect malaria in an area which has been free of it for a dozen years. But the state's health officials were already swamped with work from an outbreak of encephalitis in the Central Valley (TIME, Aug. 25). Could Dr. Langmuir help?

He could, and promptly did. Senior Scientist Roy Fritz (who is working for a Ph. D. in entomology) and Nurse Albina Bozym flew west. For weeks they worked from early morning till late at night, checking on the Camp Fire Girls' recent illnesses. They found six more cases of malaria. The girls must have been infected at Lake Vera. Mosquitoes trapped there proved to be the disease-carrying kind. But who took the malaria there to begin with?

For a while the disease detectives seemed to be up against a blank wall. After almost a month, they got a break. The owner of a house near the camp asked a neighbor casually: "Wasn't it too bad about the malaria at the camp?" "Yes," was the answer, "but he's all right now." "He?" "Yes--my son. He got malaria in Korea and had a relapse while he was visiting up here." As soon as this backyard chitchat was reported to Dr. Fritz, the puzzle was solved. The marine veteran of Korea got medical care, and spread the disease no more. The Lake Vera area was sprayed to kill off the last infected mosquitoes and leave the site safe for this year.

To the 32 disease detectives of the U.S. Public Health Service, the Lake Vera as signment was little out of the ordinary. In 1952 (its first full year of operation) the Epidemic Intelligence Service answered more than 200 calls for aid from local and state health officials, Dr. Langmuir reported last week. Proudly, he added: "I know of no case where it took more than 24 hours to answer a request." But usually disease was already rife -- in 18 outbreaks of infectious jaundice, eight each of poliomyelitis and encephalitis, and odd instances of rarer ills.

The most unusual epidemic of 1952, and in some ways the most frightening, said Dr. Langmuir, was an outbreak of anthrax among swine in Ohio. Anthrax (an often fatal disease, marked by a malignant carbuncle) might be spread by a foe in biological warfare. (In this case, the infection was traced to bone meal from Belgium, where it had been transshipped from the Near East and the Far East.) But that also made the experience especially valuable for Dr. Langmuir's operators. Public health officials who have had a year's duty in the E.I.S. would be the best-equipped disease detectives if biological warfare should come.

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