Knock-Out Campaign

For almost two weeks, Chicago had been breaking out in a rash of cryptic signs: "KOVD." The letters were stenciled in red on Loop sidewalks. They flowered 10,000 feet overhead in sky writing and billboards showed them painted on a giant boxing glove. The city's Health Department was getting a message to Chicagoans: KNOCK OUT VENEREAL DISEASE.

In its own flamboyant fashion, Chicago had given a lusty preview of the national anti-VD campaign which opened last week in more than 300 cities in 28 states. The U.S. Public Health Service, helping to plan and synchronize the local efforts, had arranged with the Communication Materials Center of New York's Columbia University Press to provide posters, car cards, window displays, pamphlets and match books.

Put It Down. The public campaign was as plain-spoken as the anti-VD drives directed at servicemen during the war. Motorists in Arkansas found themselves questioned by billboards: "Have you got syphilis?" Barflies put nickels in Washington jukeboxes to hear a Negro quartet sing Put It Down, an appeal to stamp out VD. The Columbia Center was about to issue a recording by Balladeer Tom Glazer of a twangy song called An Ignorant Cowboy. Its last stanza:

A ranch on the range isn't likely to find Much use for a cowboy who's dead,

lame or blind,

So if you've known Katey, Please listen to this: Only a doctor can cure syphilis!

Stay-at-homes will not be able to escape the publicity blasts. For radio there are 15-minute musical dramatizations, torch songs and spot announcements. For television there are movie shorts.

Slug It Out. One way & another, the Public Health Service hoped to reach 96^ million people. Among them would be a high proportion of the unreported syphilis victims in the U.S., estimated at 2,000,000. The object was to persuade them to step forward and accept penicillin treatment (one day for gonorrhea, eight for syphilis). P.H.S. knows that the fight against syphilis is being slowly won: against some 220,-ooo new cases each year, 373,296 cases were reported and treated in 1947, and 338,141 last year.

In kicking off the 1949 campaign, Chicago got its chance to remind its citizens that it had pioneered in bringing the fight against VD into the open. Its publicity-loving Health Commissioner, Dr. Herman Niels Bundesen, once dragged in Al Capone's girl friend for a blood test. He still tacks up syphilis quarantine signs himself, with the butt of a pistol, on any tavern which refuses to send its bar girls in for tests. Pointing to Chicago's syphilis rate, which has dropped 45% against a national drop of 37%, Bundesen boldly boasts: "Chicago is the safest place in the world today to have intercourse." But, he adds: "We must stay in the ring and slug it out. There is no rest between rounds when the enemy is syphilis."

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