Cow-Dung Cure

All over two of Brazil's states, Minas Gerais and Sao Paulo, health workers were directing homeowners last week in what looked like a most unsanitary task: coating the walls inside thousands of mud huts with a mixture containing cow dung. As a result, Dr. Mario Pinotti, running the campaign from his modernistic 18th-floor office in Rio, was confident that thousands of lives would be saved.

The enemy was Chagas' disease, named 50 years ago for the late great Dr. Carlos Chagas, who found that this misnamed "South American sleeping sickness" was caused by a trypanosome, a microscopic animal with a complex life cycle, transmitted to man by bugs. The critters have Latin names longer than their bodies. Brazilians call them simply barbeiros (barbers) because they bite the tender skin of the face and throat.

Who Threw That Stone? The barbeiros' favorite prey is children. The consequences : damage to the young heart muscle; severe, crippling illness; and in many cases sudden death. In adults the disease is debilitating, persistent and incurable, but is less apt to kill. Estimated number of victims: 4,000,000 in Brazil (pop. 62 million) alone, millions more from Bahia Blanca to the southern border of the U.S.

Like many a health worker before him, Dr. Pinotti knew that the barbeiros flourish in the cracks of dirt-poor Brazilians' mud huts. The famed-Textbook of Medicine, edited by Manhattanites Cecil and Loeb, says flatly: "Prophylaxis consists in constructing houses so as to avoid cracks in the walls." Easier said than done. But Dr. Pinotti, once a poor boy in Sao Paulo, had an idea: "One night when I was brooding over the problem, I remembered the ovenbird's nest.* As a boy, I used to throw stones at their nests, but the nests never cracked. They're like iron. Why?" A research project was hurriedly launched, provided the answer: ovenbirds in Sao Paulo build their rock-hard, crackproof, oven-shaped nests with a mixture of sand and cow dung.

Not Even a Smell. Health Crusader Pinotti, head of Brazil's two-year-old National Department of Endemic Diseases, mixed trial batches of dung with his own well-manicured hands, personally daubed some wattle walls and waited. No cracks developed, and not a barbeiro could be found in the huts. Last year Dr. Pinotti ran a pilot study on 2,000 homes. After six months, none harbored a barbeiro, though 98% had been infested previously. Last week the dung mixers were busy on two projects, each involving 100,000 homes. Said Pinotti: "No cracked mud means no barbeiros and no new cases of Chagas' disease. The dry dung in the mix doesn't even smell, and we have checked and made sure that it transmits no other diseases." Pinotti's goal: 2,500,000 dung-cured homes, the end of Chagas' disease within a generation.

*Not to be confused with North America's ovenbird. Sciurus aurocapillus (a warbler). South American ovenbirds number scores of species, belong to a distinct family akin to ant birds and flycatchers.

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