We recently heard some good news about our "stringer" (part-time corre spondent) in Rangoon. He is On Pe, outstanding Burmese author and jour nalist. The news : he receives this month the 1950 Sape Beikman ("Literary Shrine") Prize, his country's equivalent of a Pulitzer Prize.

The award is presented by the Burma Translation Society, which is headed by Prime Minister Thakin Nu. It goes to the best novel of the year, in this case On Pe's Min Hmu Dan ("The Civil Servant"), a story of the corrupt bu reaucracy run by Burmese and British officials during Britain's rule in Burma.

Stringer On Pe reports to TIME edi tors on conditions in his area and aids regular correspondents when they arrive on story assignments. He is a graduate of the University of Rangoon, later taught there. After hold ing several top edi torial spots, he has become chief editor of Burma Press Syn dicate. His wife, Nu Yin, is a poetess and short-story writer.

Under the pen name "Tet Toe," which means "Progress," Newsman Pe has translated many Western classics for Burmese readers. Among them : Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Ludwig's Napoleon and several De Maupassant short stories. One less classical On Pe translation: Dale Carnegie's How to Stop Worrying and Start Living. With his new novel he plans to reverse the process by translating it into English for British and American readers.

The National Institutes of Health in Washington report that TIME recently helped, in an odd way, to solve a medical mystery. Here's their story:

Pediatricians in & around Washington had been concerned in recent summers over an "unknown" illness which had broken out among children. Symptoms: sudden and high fever, small blisters in the throat, occasional loss of appetite, vomiting, convulsions and prostration, head-and stomachache. Dr. R. J. Huebner and other doctors hunted high & low in medical literature for description of such a disease but found none. Deciding it was a new one, they prepared to report it in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Then one day, luckily before he sent in the report, Dr. Huebner read our Medicine section's story (TIME, Sept. 4) on the quasi-retirement of Dr. John Zahorsky, a granddaddy of American pediatrics and once Huebner's professor.

Though he hadn't thought of his old teacher in years, Huebner knew that if any U.S. doctor had ever described the mysterious children's disease, it would be Zahorsky. He dug out the aging doctor's books, got results. One Zahorsky tome listed the symptoms, called the disease "Herpangina." Following this clue, doctors found that Zahorsky had first named the disease in 1924.

Saved from a medical slip, Dr. Huebner and colleagues rewrote this report for publication in the A.M.A. Journal (March 3). Instead of telling about a "new" child's disease, they reported the rediscovery of Herpangina.

There is some evidence that this kind of thing happens fairly often among the 96,000 U.S. doctors and dentists who read TIME each week. It may help explain why members of the AMA vote TIME "America's most important magazine."

--

You may be wearing a TIME cover around your neck, as a cravat. Reason: cloth designers such as Georgette Duffee of Manhattan's Falcon Studio keep their patterns somewhat tied to the news. When she saw Artist Boris Artzy-basheff's cover picture of Siam's King Phumiphon last year, she thought it offered a good way to keep her lines related to the increased news on Southeast Asia. So the cover's little men with lanterns, its tiny half-moons and mystic squibbles, became part of a maroon-blue-white design. When a researcher went to buy a TIME tie, she found only one left in stock.

Cordially yours,

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