Disaster Averted

To first-year biology students, the amoeba is one of the oldest, simplest and most fascinating forms of animal life. To men of the U.S. armed forces on duty in countries where sanitation is primitive, the amoeba is a treacherous foe which can infiltrate their digestive tracts and cause dysentery or death. Last week 1,490 employees of the Singer Manufacturing Co.'s plant in South Bend, Ind. found themselves, with their families and friends, in all-out war against the lowly amoeba, with no truce in sight.

Perhaps one out of every ten in the U.S. population carries a few amoebae in his bowels for most of his life, and they never bother him. So doctors did not think it significant when Harry J. Myer, 51, a Singer worker from Grovertown, who died last November of a "liver abscess," was found to have had amoebiasis. But then technicians of the South Bend Medical Foundation, who make the pathology tests for most of the city's doctors, began to find amoeba in more and more stool samples. They reported this to Health Officer F. R. Nicholas Carter. Meanwhile, a second Singer worker who died of a "liver abscess" was found to have had amoebiasis; a third death was plainly due to amoebic dysentery, and there was a fourth just as an investigation got under way with state and federal disease detectives helping.

A quick check of 138 Singer workers showed about half with amoebiasis, though at a nearby factory the rate was only 3%. That told where the infestation was concentrated, but not where it came from. Milk? No one dairy supplied an undue proportion of the victims' families. Food? Not likely, because 85% of the workers went home for lunch or carried lunch pails to the factory. That left the water. The sprawling, four-story plant had been built 52 years ago in a district where the city then had no water mains, so it relied on its own drilled well. Old soil pipes might have cracked or rusted through, letting sewage seep into the water supply.

Cagily, Dr. Carter let the news out in a thin trickle so that Singer workers in particular, and South Bend's citizens in general, did not panic. He arranged to pipe city water to the Singer plant. This week every man jack among its woodworkers began submitting stool specimens for laboratory analysis: as many as 9,000 may be needed over a period of six months. Only then will it be known which workers are clear of amoebae. For the estimated 700 who will get positive reports, there will be immediate free treatment with fumagillin or terramycin. At full cost, the program would run to $77,000, but manufacturers will supply about $30,000 worth of drugs free.

South Bend was lucky. The first great U.S. outbreak of amoebiasis came in 1933, when doctors were unprepared for it.

Spawned in Chicago's Congress and Auditorium Hotels when sewage got into food rooms and water pipes, it was not detected until at least 1,400 victims had scattered across the U.S., caused close to 100 deaths. (Best-known victim: Nightclub Hostess Texas Guinan.) With earlier detection and better drugs, South Bend need fear no such disaster.

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