Health Engineers

As man has worked up from the opposable thumb to the implosible bomb, he has learned endless ways to change his environment. He can raise or raze forests, reverse rivers, level mountains or reshuffle atoms, but he cannot alter the fact that his health depends, as always, upon the food he eats, the water he drinks and the air he breathes. To safeguard these, he has to work, in an endless spiral, for more complete control of his environment.

Last week the U.S. took a big step toward that fuller control. On Cincinnati's outskirts, Secretary Oveta Gulp Hobby dedicated a six-story laboratory building for the U.S. Public Health Service, gave it the mouthfilling name of Robert A. Taft Sanitary Engineering Center. Said Mrs. Hobby: "Sanitary engineering had its origins in [man's] first crude efforts to gather and store rainwater for drinking purposes and to dispose of wastes effectively." It is still concerned with the same problems, though in different forms.

Tricky Water. Cincinnati has been a center for U.S. public-health studies since 1913, when health engineers settled in an old downtown mansion to study Ohio River pollution. Water-borne typhoid fever, raging in the Ohio Valley in those days, was their chief concern. Nowadays, the typhoid bacillus is "literally no longer a problem" to Dr. Leslie A. Chambers, research director of the center. His staff must now tackle the far more complex problems of contamination of both water and food by viruses and fungi, synthetic chemicals and radioactivity.

In their air-conditioned laboratories (environment in the center is controlled to the last decimal), P.H.S. researchers, working under exhaust hoods, are trying to cultivate the virus of infectious hepatitis (TIME, Feb. 8), which is often waterborne. A mycologist has isolated 150 different kinds of fungi, some of which may cause disease, from river water. And glass tanks are filled with minnows to test how much cyanide wastes can go into river water without killing nature's scavengers.

Dirty Air. With atomic-energy plants mushrooming upriver in Ohio's Pike County and downstream at Paducah, and the first atomic-power plant scheduled for the Pittsburgh area, the control of radioactive waste waters will be a gigantic problem. Lessons learned along the Ohio will be applied to the AEC's Savannah River plant and others on the West Coast. Radioactivity in the Columbia River below the AEC's Hanford plant has not reached an alarming level, the health engineers report, and though fish pick up some, most of it settles in such inedible parts as bone, heart and liver.

Cincinnati is also busy with air samples. A paper filter exhibited at the center last week was black with filth from local air, which had been sucked through it. Doctors have seen that the city's curve of smog concentrations matched the curve of deaths from heart and respiratory disease. Each day the center receives filters, coated with air pollutants collected by the same process in 23 other U.S. cities, for analysis and comparison. Right now, the Fort Worth filters are tan from wind-borne topsoil. Those from Detroit and Los Angeles show that, at rush hours, the lead content from automobile exhausts is near the limit of human tolerance.

Woman's world is giving the sanitary engineers still further challenges. The garbage disposer ("mechanical pig") built into kitchen sinks is overloading city-sewage systems. And the fancy new detergents used in automatic dishwashing gum up the treatment plants: they foam crazily and resist chemical breakdown. This problem of wastes is where the sanitary engineers came in, thousands of years ago. Ahead of them are more turns of the same spiral.

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