End Measles Now

To the casual observer, the heavy snow, gale winds and high tides that struck most of the Northeast last week seemed to have turned Rhode Island into a disaster area. Like homeless refugees, long lines of crying children clinging to their parents snaked through the gloom. But it was not the storm that turned out the Sunday crowds. Rhode Island was engaged in a well-planned exercise in preventive medicine.

Health authorities had estimated that the state contained 52,000 children, aged one to twelve, who had never had measles or been vaccinated against it. Faced with mounting evidence that ordinary red or "seven-day" measles, as distinct from German measles, kills or cripples more children than had previously been recognized, the Rhode Island Medical Society decided on a blitz campaign to "end measles now, once and for all," within its borders.

City & Country. Doctors manned 36 clinics, mostly in schools. In the larger centers, they were armed with high-pressure air guns to squirt a dose of vaccine through the skin of a child's arm so fast that he could hardly feel it. Smaller centers used conventional hypodermic needles. The vaccine, Pitman-Moore's attenuated, live-virus form (TIME, Feb. 19), was free, but parents, who were asked to drop a token quarter into a donation box, contributed $8,256.68, or 26-c- a shot.

One of the worst turnouts was in Providence, where only 5,971 children, of an estimated 12,500 eligible, braved the storm. Hardier rural types ran the state's total up to 31,764 vaccinations.

Block Island, cut off by the gale, added twelve of a possible 40. This week make-up clinics are expected to catch several thousand more. The total will be enough to protect the state against widespread measles epidemics, though there may still be isolated cases. Health officers will then have to see to it that the 18,000 babies born annually are vaccinated soon after they are a year old.

Brain Damage. Though Rhode Island's effort was the most dramatic, it was by no means the only major attack against measles in progress or in the planning stage. In Michigan's Isabella County, after an outbreak in which 92 cases were reported--and 900 suspected--2,076 children were vaccinated in a drive that ended last week. With federal backing, 36 states and 41 communities are setting up vaccination campaigns.

All over the country concern about measles is increasing. At the research level, physicians and other virologists have long been puzzled about how and when the measles virus attacks the brain, as it does in an estimated 4,000 U.S. cases of encephalitis each year. Last week, in the Journal of the A.M.A., a team of U.C.L.A. pediatricians reported finding traces of the virus in the nervous system during the active, red-rash phase of the disease. The discovery casts doubt on the idea that encephalitis is an aftereffect, and it lends a sense of urgency to the preventive campaigns.

With the development of a safe and effective vaccine, says the Journal, measles and its complications--particularly encephalitis, with resulting permanent brain damage and "notable mortality"--can be virtually, eliminated: "All that is needed is wide acceptance and diligent use of the vaccine."

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