Bacteria Around the Cape

Indian bones sell well in Europe. Ground up, packed in bags and shipped by sea, they are an ingredient in products from Belgian glue to the yellow gelatin that French gourmets fancy with their pate. Little matter that lately bone exporters have reportedly been fleshing out their shipments of animal bones with human skeletal remains fished from the Ganges downstream from the funeral ghats at Benares.

What matters more is that for the past five months, European dock workers have found bone-ship holds swarming with scorpions, beetles and spiders three inches across. And what matters a great deal more is that over the years, some of the longshoremen who had agreed to handle the 220-lb. sacks of bones have been falling gravely ill.

At Dunkirk, Port Authority Physician Rudolphe Desage sent 15 men who had been scratched by jagged bone fragments to the hospital. Three of them developed dark pustules that are usually symptomatic of anthrax, an infectious disease transmitted by animal remains. Treated with antibiotics, all recovered except Paul DuBois, 30, who died in August. Desage blames this outbreak, and another in Marseille that hospitalized 22, on the closing of the Suez Canal. The extra three weeks freighters take to sail around the Cape of Good Hope, says Desage, plus two equatorial crossings, are "ideal" conditions for the development of anthrax bacteria. Dock workers have now become so leary of unloading bone shipments that only one port in all of Western Europe--Antwerp--remains open to them.

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