Not Too Rare, Please

Washington took it off the ration list. But meat--some meat--was viewed with alarm last week by Detroit's Dr. S. E. Gould. Dr. Gould was brooding about trichinosis, the sometimes-fatal worm disease that people get from infested pork.

Autopsies have shown that some 16% of U.S. citizens get trichinosis at one time or another. But Dr. Gould now suspects that the figure is 25% to 36%.

The tiny, encysted worms can live in the muscles of bears, dogs, birds, cats, guinea pigs, monkeys, rabbits, horses and cattle. But they much prefer hogs, rats and men. Once in the muscles, the worms are there for the life of their victim. Most people who get trichinosis never know it. But one in a hundred has chills, fever, muscle pains until his system gets used to the invaders. Six in 10,000 die of damage to the heart after about a month of painful muscle spasms.

About 1.5% of U.S. hogs are infested, and one gram of infested meat may contain thousands of the parasites. The disease is passed along chiefly by feeding garbage to hogs.

The Government does a fairly good job of keeping an eye on pork likely to be incompletely cooked, hamburgers and frankfurters. But Dr. Gould warned that the words "U.S. inspected and passed" don't mean much on roasts and chops. The Government stopped making microscopic examinations of meat in 1906.

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