Threadworm Epidemic

Whole villages in southern Mexico are threatened with mass blindness as an obscure disease sweeps the tropical, coffee-growing state of Chiapas. Thus far Government sanitary brigades have only sized up the enemy--a kind of filaria or threadworm, whose eggs are spread from victim to victim by gnats. The eggs develop into hairlike parasites, some 20 inches long, which work their way through the body toward the head and shoulders. There they reproduce and multiply into tangled masses, forming cysts.

When the victim becomes lumpy around the face and head, he is doomed to blindness unless the cysts are cut away before the threadworms reach the eyes. Even when the cysts are removed, the victim may become reinfected; for doctors doubt that the gnats, which spread the parasites, can be exterminated--even with DDT.

The disease, called onchocercosis, is apparently of African origin. First found in Guatemala, it spread into Chiapas with migrations of coffee pickers; a smaller outbreak in Oaxaca was attributed to pilgrims who had visited a Guatemalan shrine. The Inter-American highway is now opening the remote region for the first time, and epidemiologists fear that the disease will spread into the rest of Mexico. One fact which comforts Mexican researchers: though the disease has spread through the coffee-growing regions, where peons are mostly undernourished, it seldom attacks healthy, well-fed people.

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