No More Typhoid Marys?

When his super-centrifuge machine conked out and couldn't be repaired during the war, tousle-haired Biochemist John Vaichulis began looking around Illinois' Manteno State Mental Hospital for some other project to keep him busy. In one building on Manteno's grounds he found a group of patients who were never allowed to mix with other patients. They were the country's largest concentration of typhoid carriers, the backwash of a 1939 epidemic which swept Manteno, plus patients sent from other Illinois state hospitals to be isolated.

Breeding Place. Although they no longer suffered from typhoid themselves, they were human breeding grounds for typhoid germs, could pass the disease on to others.* The only treatment then known was the removal of the gall bladder (where typhoid germs often breed), an expensive and disagreeable operation that did no good if other organs such as the intestines had also become breeding places.

Vaichulis, who had made up his mind to be a research scientist when he was a kid in Chicago's Lithuanian slums 30 years ago, deciding to have a go at the tenacious typhoid bugs, teamed up in experiments with famed Illinois Physiologist Andrew C. Ivy (TIME, Jan. 13, 1947). There were 146 patients in Manteno's "Typhoid Hall" when Drs. Ivy and Vaichulis began treating them. By last week all but six had given repeated negative reactions to culture tests for typhoid; most had already been released as disinfected. The two doctors were ready to tell the world about two new treatments for typhoid carriers.

Two Measures. Treatment No. 1 is antagonistic bacilli, taken by mouth in ginger ale or some other carbonated beverage. Once in the patient's system, the bacilli produce an "antibiotic" which kills off the typhoid germs in two weeks to a month. Treatment No. 2, a combination of penicillin, three sulfa drugs (thiazole, diazine and merazine) plus alcohol and a dye called iodophthalein, injected in the patients' muscles or veins, works faster but it made 50% of Manteno's patients violently ill.

So far the only typhoid carriers to benefit from the new drugs are those at

Manteno. Others will have to wait at least a year until the treatments are ready for the market. Meanwhile, the two researchers are back in their laboratories, hoping to prove that their treatments will knock out other epidemic diseases such as cholera and dysentery.

*The first carrier to be recognized in the U.S.

was "Typhoid Mary" Mallon, reputed to have infected 57 people, three of whom died. She was carted off in 1907 by court order to New York City's North Brother Island, held there off & on until she died of a stroke in 1938.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.