Pediatricians

Children need doctors, and children are everywhere. Last week, for the first time since 1937, some 1,800 pediatricians from all over the world (59 nations) met in Manhattan's plushy Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Their medical findings confirmed some things that most people already knew: undernourishment and tuberculosis are rampant among children throughout Europe, Asia and Latin America. But the meeting also produced some new, surprising findings.

Small but Healthy. A British team headed by Cambridge University's Nutrition Expert R. A. McCance had made a searching study of some typical children in the British zone of Germany. The youngsters, living on a subnormal diet of cereals and vegetables, with almost no meat or milk, were shockingly small for their ages. But they seemed to be in excellent health. They were remarkably free from disease, showed no sign of rickets or vitamin deficiencies, played games as hard and spiritedly as U.S. children. The investigators concluded that the youngsters had adjusted to the reduced diet by developing smaller-than-normal bodies which required less food.

The foreign delegates had come to the meeting mostly to catch up on recent U.S. advances in children's medicine. But the most original piece of scientific work reported to the meeting was by a German, Dr. Rudolf Degkwitz, who had spent part of the war in concentration camps.

"Aimed Injection." Degkwitz's invention: a new method of shooting an "aimed injection" of a healing drug at a given organ of the body. His method (which he did not make entirely clear to U.S. doctors) involves varying the molecular pattern of the drug. Dr. Degkwitz first crystallizes the drug in a shape and size that fits into the organ at which it is aimed. When the drug is in the form of needle-shaped crystals, for example, the crystals after injection into a vein go straight to the lungs. Round crystals of various sizes, says Degkwitz, can be deposited at will in the liver, spleen, bone marrow.

Degkwitz reported that he had already tried his injection method against tuberculosis, with promising results. Using two aniline dyes that seem to be lethal to tuberculosis bacilli, he gave daily injections to T.B.-infected guinea pigs. In six weeks, he said, he had cured 98% of them.

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