Medics for the Millions

For delegates to the annual regional conference of the World Health Organization in Formosa last week, a must on the agenda was a side trip to a cluster of laboratories in Taipei. The labs are the headquarters of a far-ranging, little-publicized U.S. Navy unit known as Namru-2 (for Naval Medical Research Unit No. 2). What the delegates saw of Namru-2's work was so impressive that they later passed a resolution to accept the unit's standing offer of emergency help in epidemics among Asia's civilian population. As most of the delegates well knew, Namru-2 has long since proved its value to Asia's millions.

Commanded by Iowa-born Captain Robert A. Phillips, 53, Namru-2 is a mobile, down-to-earth outfit which operates on the premise that more fighting men have been felled by disease than by broadsword or bomb. Its primary mission is to secure medical knowledge of potential military significance. In the process, it helps protect and improve the health of peoples wherever U.S. troops are stationed in the Far East. Roaming free Asia in everything from jeeps to light planes, Namru's field teams (average strength: twelve men) have collected mosquitoes from traps in dunghills, snails from paddyfields, snakes from underbrush, argued Chinese followers of Confucius out of their scruples about giving blood samples, braved a batch of contagious epidemics.

Dramatic Success. Namru-2 scored one of its most striking successes in fighting cholera outbreaks in East Pakistan and Thailand. Drugs are of little value against the disease, which kills mainly by causing a tremendous loss of body fluids; in the acute diarrhea stage, as much as four gallons may be lost in a single day. Measuring the victim's need for fluids and body salts usually requires costly and complex electronic gadgets, but Namru-2 medics adapted an inexpensive Rockefeller Institute technique, found that they could learn what they needed by putting a few drops of blood into solutions of copper sulfate ($1.50 per lb.). Pouring in fluids intravenously but giving nothing by mouth, Namru-2 doctors saw their patients recover. For the medically poor areas the Namru-2 success dramatized the fact that cholera, if promptly diagnosed and properly treated, need not be fatal. Proof: the death rate among Namru-2 patients dropped from the prevailing 60% to less than 5%.

With a roster of 23 Americans (including four M.D.s. four science Ph.D.s) and 155 Chinese (including three Formosan M.D.s, one Ph.D.), Namru-2 is also at work on a variety of other projects:

P:An on-the-spot study in a 50-sq. mi. section of Formosa's west coast to find the source of ''blackfoot," a locally common arterial disease that causes fingers and toes to become gangrenous; sometimes the victim loses both hands and feet.

P: Research on schistosomes. parasites that attack the intestinal tracts of workers in irrigated fields throughout most of Africa and Asia, but on Formosa mainly assail animals. Namru-2 wants to know why.

P:The widest study yet made of the effect of German measles on the fetus when it strikes a woman during the first three months of pregnancy. In 1957 an epidemic swept 2,000,000 Formosans. The island's high pregnancy rate gives Namru-2 a mass of data now being analyzed.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.