Leukemia Clue?

Twelve federal disease detectives were gumshoeing through the normally placid Chicago suburb of Niles (13 miles northwest of the Loop) last week, on what looked like a hot trail in the hunt for a cause of acute leukemia (blood cancer) in childhood. An outbreak of cases in that community suggests for the first time that childhood leukemia, while definitely not infectious in any ordinary sense, somehow spreads from some common source.

As in all cancer, leukemia's causes and cure are unknown. Largely as a result of the work of Dr. Steven ). Schwartz of Chicago's Hektoen Institute (TIME, April 11, 1960), there is growing suspicion that the villain is a virus. Dr. Schwartz injected volunteers in Cook County Jail with leukemic fluid and, he believes, developed in them immunity to the disease.

One Parish. Among Niles children there have been eight cases of acute leukemia in three years, from a population of 20,000--about four times the overall U.S. rate. Three occurred during an eight-month period beginning in September 1957; five more developed in the eight months beginning in December 1959. Six of the victims have already died.

The children were not related to each other, and their parents were not acquainted. All victims belonged to families that in recent years moved out from crowded Chicago. In every case, the parents took the sick child to their old doctor in Chicago. The eight doctors sent the eight children to eight different hospitals. So the unusual cluster of cases might easily have been overlooked.

But Sister Mary Viva, principal of St. John Brebeuf School, knew that all the children lived in that parish. Three of the leukemia victims were attending the school when their illness began; four others were preschool tots with older brothers or sisters in the school; the eighth, though in public school, had friends in the parish school. Sister Mary reported her concern to the Illinois branch of the American Cancer Society, which notified Dr. Schwartz. Then Dr. Robert J. Hasterlik, of the Argonne Cancer Research Hospital, called in epidemiologists from the U.S. Public Health Service's Communicable Disease Center in Atlanta.

Search for Virus. The disease detectives have interviewed the parents, other kin, and the doctors of all the victims. They have established that Niles has a normal amount of background radiation, and that the children had not had excessive X rays. They have taken blood samples from the families of the dead children and from the two victims still living, to check for possible leukemia viruses. Dr. Schwartz hopes to find evidence that contacts of the Niles victims have developed immunity to the disease. He believes that this will be shown if there are no more cases in the Niles community for four or five years. Investigation might also show that some other disease is the culprit, by making children more susceptible to acute leukemia, or by triggering its onset.

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