Africa v. Yaws

In Ceylon it is called parangi, in the Fiji Islands coco, in the Gold Coast dube. By these and some 80 other dread names, yaws is known the world over as a painful, crippling and highly contagious disease that covers the body with sores and eventually eats away the outer flesh. Half its estimated 50 million victims, most of whom caught it as children, are in Africa.

In the last seven years, 32 countries have cured almost 10 million people of yaws, with the help of the World Health Organization and the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund. Last week the biggest anti-yaws campaign in history was forming. Its goal: to wipe yaws from the African continent within ten years by examining nearly 100 million Africans, discovering and treating all the continent's victims.

WHO and UNICEF will supply free penicillin, send technical advisers when necessary. African nations will match this contribution in personnel, equipment and operating costs. Already, whole villages are shuffling through palm-topped clinics improvised by traveling medical units. The word of penicillin's magic has spread: a single shot, costing only 12-c-, cures a victim of yaws.

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