Scare & Schools

All last week the Eastern seaboard of the U. S. from North Carolina to Maine tingled fearfully to such news dispatches as the following:

Fall River, Mass.: ''Young infantile paralysis victims prepared to draw lots today to determine who should be the first to receive serum which may save their lives. . . . The opening of schools has been postponed."

Bangor, Me.: "Infantile paralysis has not reached epidemic proportions, but conditions are alarming enough to prevent parents from using home remedies when symptoms of the disease occur."

New Haven, Conn.: "Public, private and parochial schools in Waterbury, Derby, Naugatuck, Wolcott, Southington and other towns near here will remain closed indefinitely due to the number of cases of infantile paralysis."

Johnstown, N. Y.: "Health authorities reported 24 cases of infantile paralysis today in the Johnstown-Gloversville area."

Clarendon, Va.: "The county school board yesterday announced postponement of the opening of public schools from Sept. 9 to Sept. 15."

Raleigh, N. C.: "The school board has definitely postponed openings until Sept. 24."

New York City: "Health officials said they would be unable to predict whether it would be safe to open the schools on Sept. 9 as scheduled. . . . This week should mark the peak of the current outbreak. . . . The death rate this year has been exceptionally low, less than 5%. . . . In 1916 it was 27%."

Atlantic Highlands, N. J.: "Sunday school classes will not be held here tomorrow and opening of public schools was delayed a week until Sept. 9 at the request of the Board of Health as precaution against infantile paralysis. . . . One case of infantile paralysis has been reported."

Into Panic's teeth Surgeon General Hugh Smith Cumming threw this information: "Infantile paralysis cases reported to the U. S. Public Health Service to date: North Carolina, 558; Virginia, 473; District of Columbia, 37; Massachusetts, 389; New York, 941. The District of Columbia, Virginia and North Carolina have apparently passed the seasonal peak. . . .

"Practically everywhere in the U. S., including communities where infantile paralysis has been epidemic, the schools will open on time if the advice of those who have studied the situation is followed."

Nonetheless, Dr. Cumming's staff recommended that the University of Virginia, located at Charlottesville where infantile paralysis has been heavily concentrated, remain closed this autumn.

Parents of the nation pestered Manhattan's nervous little Dr. Maurice Brodie for his much-publicized vaccine of which he has issued some 6,000 doses. But because he gets only ten doses out of each $15 rhesus monkey imported from India, he has had to deny vaccine requisitions right & left. Dr. Brodie does not claim that his vaccine is the definitive preventive of infantile paralysis and other physicians will not concede its validity until after some 50,000 children have been inoculated and their resistance to the disease adequately tested. On the other hand, the vaccine does no harm.

That the disease now raising fears along the Eastern seaboard may not be infantile paralysis at all is a medical thought that has been trying to intrude itself for the past several weeks. Last week shock-haired Dr. John Augustus Toomey, children's specialist of Cleveland's Western Reserve University, impatiently declared that many of the cases must have been "gastro-neuritis with spinal fluid changes." This seems to be a newly recognized disease. Its symptoms--pain in head and upper abdomen, pain on movement, increase of certain cells in spinal fluid and blood--pass quickly. There are no known aftereffects.

Last week, also, Dr. Toomey impatiently objected to the current belief advanced by Dr. Simon Flexner, that infantile paralysis is contracted through the nose, whence the virus passes up the nerve of smell to the brain and spinal cord. In Science last week Dr. Toomey flatly declared: "In the human being the causative agent usually enters the digestive system," whence it passes to the spine by way of sympathetic nerves. According to Dr. Toomey true infantile paralysis is caused by a virus which attacks nerves after a toxin created by the virus makes those nerves vulnerable. The paralysis which Dr. Brodie and other experimenters produce in monkeys, says Dr. Toomey, "is not the kind of poliomyelitis that is seen in the human being." One plain reason: the monkey's four legs become paralyzed; the human being's arms are much less frequently affected.

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