Capsules

P: Fresh from a nine-day visit to Moscow (with five other U.S. medicos), where he inspected Soviet methods of treating and rehabilitating heart patients, Presidential Consultant Paul Dudley White touched down in Stockholm. There he told a European congress of cardiologists--he may have been inspired by Russian banquets--that overeating among leading citizens as a cause of high blood pressure and heart trouble, "may play even more of a role in the destiny of the world than the under-nutrition of hundreds of millions."

P: Farmers and their helpers are subject to a mysterious illness called "silo-filler's disease" if they go into a silo soon after it has been filled while fermentation is at its height. In the A.M.A. Journal, two Minneapolis doctors report that the disease, which may be fatal, results from damage to the lungs caused by inhaling oxides of nitrogen. The preventive: "Allow no one to enter a silo for any purpose from the time filling begins until seven to ten days after it is finished."

P: In operating for cancer of the breast, surgeons usually remove lymph nodes in the armpit through which the cancer cells might spread and cause a recurrence. Dr. Jerome A. Urban of Manhattan's Memorial Hospital reports more success (judged by how many patients have remained free of apparent disease for five years) by a more radical operation: hunting down and removing a chain of tiny lymph nodes that lie underneath the breastbone.

P: Long in the business of making fertilizer from sewage, the Milwaukee City Sewerage Commission got into a new line through a commercial subcontractor: extracting the growth-vital, anti-anemia vitamin B12 from the fertilizer.

P: After weeks of medical detective work, Missouri and federal health officers tracked down a carrier responsible for a typhoid outbreak traced to a July Church of God encampment in Monark Springs. There have been at least 16 cases, at least one death (probably two) among campers. A woman, known to have been a typhoid carrier, had prepared camp food.

P: Crusaders against alcoholism (some teetotalers, some devotees of moderate drinking) gathered in Istanbul, sadly concluded that with few exceptions, such as Italy and India, most of the world's nations are getting wetter. Chief offenders: France (accused of boosting alcohol consumption in her African colonies by dumping surplus wines and brandy there) and the U.S., with a 44% increase in alcoholism in 13 years, and a rise in beer consumption from 8 to 16 1/2 gallons a year per capita since 1934.

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