Rx: Daily Bath

A daily bath prevents the disease. Three to six injections of arsenical drugs clear it up. Penicillin cures it permanently, apparently without danger of reinfection. But for lack of soap, water and penicillin, 80% of the people of Haiti are afflicted with the foul, rotting disease known as yaws. That was the grim news last week from a U.S. Sanitary Mission which has been manfully fighting yaws in Haiti for nearly three years--with little success.

A tropical skin disease to which white men are largely immune (there were only 25 cases among G.I.s during World War II), yaws is spread by contact. Though not venereal, it is caused by a spirochete that is indistinguishable from that of syphilis (like syphilis, it gives a positive Wasserman). Attacking through cuts or bruises, the spirochete first produces a raspberry-like running sore, usually on the legs. After a few months, sores erupt all over the body; in the third stage, the disease eats away the flesh.

The Revolving Door. Haiti, whither the disease was brought by slaves from Africa in 1509, now has the world's highest incidence of yaws. Since 1943 the U.S. Sanitary Mission, backed by $150,000 from the State Department's Institute of Inter-American Affairs and an equal amount from the Haitian Government, has worked hard on a project to eradicate the disease in selected districts of southern Haiti.

In ten strategically placed clinics, the mission's chief, ex-Army Major Edwin L. Dudley, a onetime Wake Forest football star, and his staff of doctors had administered 80,000 arsenical injections a month. But among Haiti's poverty-stricken masses, for whom even in normal times soap is an out-of-reach luxury, arsenical treatment is not much more effective than a revolving door. Reinfection occurs quickly.

In a penicillin test on 500 patients, the mission got lasting cures in every case./- But at $5 a shot (minimum treatment: two shots), penicillin is beyond the means of Haiti's treasury or the mission's appropriation. Last week, outside the mission's clinics, stinking, pitiful yaws victims still lined up each morning by the thousands. Some of them crawled miserably on their haunches, because their legs had been eaten away. Some had no faces left, only teeth protruding from lipless, roofless jaws.

/- The U.S. Navy is using penicillin against yaws with good effect among natives in the Marianas, the Marshalls and the Carolines. The British have used it successfully in West Africa.

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