Postwar Pestilence?

Shattered Europe's health is not so bad as might have been expected. But the worst may be yet to come. Such was the gist of an UNRRA report last week in the Journal of the American Medical Association. In Paris, Major General Warren Draper, chief of the public health branch of the Allied Military Government, said the same.

P: The likeliest time for epidemics has just arrived. The worldwide 1918-19 influenza epidemic did not start until the end of the war. Typhus, cholera, relapsing fever, smallpox, dysentery and typhoid devastated eastern Europe "after the cessation of hostilities and following the disintegration of established government over wide areas."

P: The soil for epidemics is ready for planting--far more refugees than in 1918, people without homes, people without food or soap. But fortunately, reports General Draper, most stay-at-home western Europeans have come through the war in fairly good condition. The French death rate actually dropped during German occupation (to 16.9 per 1,000 in 1943 compared with a U.S. rate of 10.9) even though individual rations were 500 calories a day less than the average 2,500-a-day requirement.

P: The seed of epidemics has multiplied and spread during the war. In twelve continental European countries, incidence of cerebrospinal meningitis, poliomyelitis, typhoid, dysentery, diphtheria and scarlet fever has more than doubled since war began. But as the world had less disease in 1939 than in 1914, infection is still low compared with 1918.

P: There have been epidemics, but all have so far been checked. Examples:

The plague, endemic in many Mediterranean ports, flared up with 712 cases in the Suez Canal Zone in 1943-44.

Typhus raged last winter in southeastern Europe. According to unofficial reports, there were 30,000 cases in Moldavia (Rumania) alone. Germany, which never used to have typhus, had 5,000 cases among slave laborers in 1943. But only two cases have appeared in France and Belgium. The Russians, who died of it by thousands in World War I, have reported little typhus in World War II.

Smallpox' wartime career has been curious: a 1944 epidemic in Italy produced 1,500 cases but only six deaths--it was a new, mild type of the disease. Last year there were only three cases of smallpox among the 200 million people of northwestern Europe.

Diphtheria has proved to be "the leading epidemic disease of the war on the European continent." In 1943 there were nearly 300,000 cases in Germany, 150,000 in The Netherlands in the last three years. The disease has occurred in wounds and has attacked an abnormally large proportion of adults. The bacteria are unusually virulent; some cases do not respond to early serum treatment, which is ordinarily a lifesaver.

"On the public health front," UNRRA hopefully concludes, "World War I lasted not four but more nearly ten years." Though "in several ways the outlook is darker than in 1918 . . .the world is now better equipped to deal with many of the important infectious diseases [and] the public health profession and services can win their war now as then."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.