Manchu Mystery

Though last July's armistice silenced the guns, a mysterious oriental killer has gone on taking the lives of U.S. servicemen in Korea. Epidemic hemorrhagic fever, or Manchurian fever (TIME, Nov. 19, 1951), has killed 17 G.I.s since the fighting ended, and last week 82 were still in the Army's special hospital at Seoul in a long battle to win back their health and strength.

Meanwhile, Army medics in Washington checked reports from overseas research teams, had to admit that they could claim only a partial victory over the disease. They are confident that it is caused by a virus, but they have failed to isolate it. Though they feel certain that the virus is carried by chiggers or mites, which in turn are harbored by rodents, they have not been able to pin down the carriers. In preventing the disease, the most they can do is to have camp sites cleared in scorched-earth fashion in the hope of denying cover to rodents and parasites, and to have the troops use insecticides in their quarters and on their persons.

Once the disease strikes, with headache, backache, fever and often hiccups, the doctors can do nothing by way of cure. But they can do much to make the victim more comfortable as the disease progresses, a process marked by hemorrhages in the eyes and under the skin of shoulders and belly, bleeding from kidneys and intestines. In the first place, because of the danger of bleeding from weakened blood vessels, the patient must not be jounced around in a jeep ambulance on his way to a rear area; the medics favor evacuation by helicopter. Because the disease affects the kidneys, nursing care involves fastidious attention to the patient's fluid balance, and the Army has sometimes found the mechanical kidney helpful.

Well stocked with human blood samples, parasites and diseased tissues, the researchers are still hoping to find the answer to hemorrhagic fever.

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