Blood on the Sidewalks

"Step right up, folks, and have your health checked," blared the sound trucks on lower Manhattan's Mulberry Street last week. "Step up and get a blood test-- it's free, it's easy and it's quick." Befitting Mulberry Street's cosmopolitanism, the English spiels alternated with the same pitch in Italian, Spanish and Chinese. At three intersections spaced two blocks apart, teams of clerks and technicians from the city's Health Department were ready for the customers at sidewalk stands surrounded by hospital screens.

If a passerby, puzzled by the vague wording of the come-on, asked what the test was for, he got a forthright answer: syphilis. If he was bashful or figured that this was none of his business, he got a pamphlet spelling out the dangers of undetected syphilis. But plenty of men (and a few women) interrupted their window-shopping or lunchtime sauntering to step behind the screens and take the test.

With one of the volunteer's arms bared and a rubber tube wrapped tight around it, a technician slipped a needle into a vein and drew out 5 cc of blood. The donor's name and address were noted and he was promised a prompt report by mail. Of the first day's 415 samples, 388 were negative; the rest were positive or doubtful. To each of these 27 subjects went a letter asking him to return for further testing or to see his own doctor and have him send the Health Department a report. After a while, if it hears nothing, the Health Department will do some sleuthing.

Behind the New York City campaign is a U.S. Public Health Service grant of $50,000 to try to find out how many unreported and probably unsuspected cases of syphilis are walking the streets. Experts believe that even if every new case of syphilis could be cured by penicillin, the disease still would not die out because there is always an infectious reservoir of old and unreported cases. On the sidewalks of Mulberry Street they hope to learn something about the size of that reservoir.

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