Capsules

P: On President Eisenhower's desk for signature this week: a bill providing the largest company health-insurance program in the country. Eligible: 2,000,000 federal employees and their families, who may choose just about any kind of medical plan they want, either Blue Cross-Blue Shield, insurance company indemnity plans, or a special group-practice plan with a contracted pool of doctors. Scheduled to go into effect July 1, 1960, the new program will cost $222 million annually, to be shared in most cases on a fifty-fifty basis by the Government and individual civil servants.

P: The dangers of pregnancy for women over 40 have been greatly exaggerated, says Obstetrician Albert L. Higdon of Teaneck, N.J. Before a Canadian meeting of obstetricians and gynecologists, he reported that studies of 21,000 mothers indicate that childbirth presents only slightly greater risks to a woman of 40 than to one of 20. The older women bore only a slightly higher percentage of Mongoloid children, suffered no more difficult deliveries, had an average mortality rate.

P: Live-polio-virus vaccines, in wide use outside the U.S., are still not really safe for general use as a public-health measure, says Baylor University's Dr. Joseph Melnick after a study of such vaccines. Melnick told the fifth Congress of Biological Standardization in Jerusalem that, while there have been relatively few cases of paralytic polio among those vaccinated with live-virus vaccines, some of the virus strains, after they pass through the human body, become more virulent. It is possible that contact with virus-infected excrement could spread polio to unvaccinated persons. His recommendation: until the stability of the virus can be fully determined, live-virus vaccine use should be limited to small test groups that can be isolated for 30 to 40 days.

P:For more than twelve years, Boston Multimillionaire Joseph P. Kennedy, onetime (1937-40) U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James's, has contributed heavily (at least $12 million) to research in mental retardation. Last week he made another gift. The Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Memorial Foundation (named for a naval aviator son who was killed in World War II) announced a $1,000,000 donation to Massachusetts General Hospital to set up and maintain a laboratory for research in diseases of the nervous system in infants and children. Principal neurological symptoms to be studied: mental retardation, cerebral palsy and epilepsy, which afflict some 7,000,000 people in the U.S.

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