Weeping Welders

With red, weepy eyes, steel and shipyard workers on the West Coast have been flocking to doctors by the hundred. By last week, the mysterious eye epidemic had spread from Portland to the San Francisco Bay area, affected at least 2,000 workers. One reason for the rapid increase : welders use each other's tools, gloves, goggles.

First noticed last October among welders at Portland, the affliction appeared to be nothing more than an outbreak of usual welders' eye injuries, caused by ultraviolet rays of torches, or specks of emery dust and steel splinters that lodged in the eyes. But when a large number of California welders had applied for State compensation, authorities realized they were dealing with an epidemic, not an occupational injury.

Even though the University of California, the State Department of Public Health, and the Rockefeller Foundation are working on the disease, no one yet knows what it is. It has been seen in Austria, India, Britain, Germany, Australia, Malaya, is probably carried by a virus. It usually infects only one eye, which becomes bloodshot, swollen, drips tears like a leaking faucet. At first the inner eyelid is speckled red, like trout, later looks like crimson velvet. During the second week there is occasional stabbing pain in the eyeball; after that there is little discomfort except the continual dripping.

Most of the men have kept on working, except in severe cases, where small grey specks on the cornea blur vision. Usually the disease runs its course in two to three weeks, brings no serious aftereffects.

The best treatment seems to be simple cleanliness. Patients are examined in special plant rooms; attendants wear sterile gowns, rubber gloves; all goggles and masks worn by workers are now sterilized before being used again.

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