Babies & Copper

Jo Ellen Koenig was a pretty, auburn-haired baby who seemed normal in every way when she was born in Cincinnati on Aug. 29, 1954. and she apparently throve on formula and some Pablum. At six months she seemed insatiably hungry. Still, her mother, a registered nurse, did not worry until 15 months, when Jo Ellen became abnormally irritable and puffy-faced. Doctors suspected leukemia--tests were negative. They thought of kidney disease--negative. Heart trouble--Jo Ellen was treated for three weeks and got no better. Finally they called in Blood Specialist Marion Eugene Lahey.

As he watched Jo Ellen get sicker and paler. Dr. Lahey remembered experiments in which rats fed nothing but milk developed anemia, which yielded only when copper as well as iron was added to their diet. He knew of no such case in human babies, but Dr. Lahey sent a sample of Jo Ellen's blood serum to Salt Lake City to be tested. Last Thanksgiving Eve, Mrs. Ellen Koenig phoned her husband from the hospital to say: "They're releasing Jo Ellen undiagnosed" (meaning incurable, in this case). At the same moment Dr. Lahey's phone was jangling with a call from Salt Lake: "The copper content of the patient's blood is low."

So Jo Ellen was a patient again. Dr. Lahey and his colleague, Dr. William Schubert, started giving her both iron and copper. Jo Ellen grew back to apparent health--although she still needs five daily doses of a solution containing copper.

In the last six months Cincinnati doctors have tried the treatment on seven other pale and puffy infants with the same good results, and now doctors in California are duplicating the work. The one feature common to all the cases is that the children were fed mostly milk; though all had vitamins, some also had a few vegetables, and a few had a little meat. Just why they are deficient in iron and copper is not clear; neither is it known whether they will have to continue taking extra iron and copper rations all their lives.

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