VD Balance Sheet

For ten years Surgeon General Thomas Parran had waged war to the death against venereal disease. How was the fight going? In a campaign report last week, his lieutenants candidly answered: "We must admit frankly that progress has not been too satisfactory." Authors of this cards-on-the-table report (The Control of Venereal Disease, Reynal & Hitchcock, $2.75): Dr. Raymond A. Vonderlehr and Dr. John R. Heller, past and present chiefs of the U.S. Public Health Service's VD division. Actually the vigorous U.S. campaign, despite defeats, has been far from a failure.

Gains :

P: Since 1936 new syphilis cases have dropped from 500,000 to 220,000 a year; infant deaths from syphilis have been halved.

P: The rise in civilian venereal disease which accompanies every war was held down, for the first time, in World War II.

P: Most states now require premarriage or prenatal blood tests, or both.

P: In the new rapid penicillin treatments, doctors think they have a tool which, if the public will cooperate, can almost eradicate venereal disease. Syphilis treatment: eight days, $52. Gonorrhea: one or two days, $13.

On the debit side:

P: Doctors are making no headway against gonorrhea. One reason: the easy cure makes people careless about exposure.

P: The VD campaign made little impression on G.I.s. Prophylaxis (preventive measures) was a flat failure; though the Army issued 600 million prophylactics, disease rates were high.

P: Speed of travel has made VD an international problem: a man may pick up infection in London one night, pass it on in Manhattan two nights later.

Epidemiological Bloodhounds. Most promising of the venereal fighters' new lines of attack is a patient, widespread attempt to trace each infection to its source. The agents: nurses, social workers and doctors, who are known as "epidemiological investigators" or "contact tracers." They have found that more than half of the patients who turn up for venereal treatment can be persuaded, with tactful handling, to name their contacts. The investigators can sometimes trace the spirochetes back through a complex transmission line (see cut). More effective than the shotgun technique of mass blood tests, contact tracing has helped venereal fighters to identify and round up for treatment thousands of active disease spreaders.

Vonderlehr and Heller think that a blood test should be a routine part of every hospital, school, insurance and industrial physical examination. "Naturally," they note, "some people would find themselves receiving a blood test several times a year -- and [for] some people this would be a very excellent idea."

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