Led by the Blind

One-seventh of all the world's people suffer from trachoma. No killer, but the cause of maddening itching and burning in the eyes, it impairs vision, often leads to blindness. Now, after 50 years of frustrating efforts to find incontrovertible proof that the disease is caused by a virus, Britain's Medical Research Council reports that researchers have closed the circle of evidence. It was a blind man who helped them to see the proof they needed.

From the eye sockets of trachoma victims, investigators had no trouble getting secretions in which they found what seemed to be a large virus. The trick was to grow it uncontaminated in the laboratory, then use it to transmit the disease. It refused to grow, or grew for a few days and vanished. A major obstacle: the disease is hard to diagnose except in man. Still, some human subjects got the disease in experiments that dishearteningly failed to convict the virus as the cause.

Surprisingly, it was in the Chinese Medical Journal (which prints a lot of unscientific Communist quackery) that major progress was reported. T'ang Fei-Fan and colleagues in Peking described scrupulously conducted experiments in which they grew generations of the virus in fertilized eggs, gave it to monkeys, which got something like trachoma.

Also surprisingly, it was the conservative British who then took the radical step of giving the disease to a human volunteer. Dr. Leslie H. Collier and colleagues began with trachoma virus from the West African colony of Gambia. It proved almost identical with the Chinese strain and could also be grown in eggs. At London's Institute of Ophthalmology the researchers found their man: an old-age pensioner, 71, who had had both eyes removed because of injury and infection (not trachoma). Into his empty eye sockets the researchers inoculated their egg-grown trachoma virus. He had considerable discomfort for the first week, and slight discomfort for two weeks more. Though his conjunctiva continued to secrete infective virus, he has needed no treatment.

Thus encouraged, the researchers found another volunteer, 54 and blind since birth. His discomfort was more severe than the first subject's, but his case also yielded more knowledge: sulfadiazine, taken by mouth, cured his infection.

Drugs are useless against most true viruses. , But the cause of trachoma is a large virus, like that of psittacosis;--ten times bigger than the virus of polio. The large viruses can be knocked out by some sulfa drugs and antibiotics--already widely used in pilot campaigns against trachoma. And the British researchers hope to make a preventive vaccine.

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