Of Flies & Fevers

Although the U.S. produces far more food than its people can possibly eat. the U.S. Government is footing the bill for $97,000 worth of research into the medical problems of starvation. The paradox makes its own kind of sense. U.S. doctors want to know the most efficient forms of certain food substances, especially proteins. And since starvation at home is too rare for large-scale study, the project has been set up in South Africa, where Cape Town provides an ideal laboratory. There, a modern medical school is located near a population with such abysmally low living standards that researchers see many cases of severe malnutrition.

From Cape Town to Oslo, the National Institutes of Health are spending $15 million a year on a whole series of overseas studies. "We're not in the foreign aid business," explains Dr. Martin M. Cummings. who heads the Institutes' Office of International Research. "We're spending money where we can get a concentration of excellence in skills, talents and resources." In most cases, a U.S. grant helps a foreign institution to do better work and improve local health standards. But by mandate of Congress, such considerations are secondary: the primary aim of financing foreign medical research is to improve health in the U.S.

The studies abroad cover the whole gamut of diseases and the agents that transmit them to man. At Osaka University Dr. Hideo Kikkawa has painstakingly bred 30 different mutant strains of houseflies to find out how some of them become resistant to insecticides. By a statistical quirk, Norway turns out to be the best place to compare the effects of different psychiatric treatments, including tranquilizers. The Oslo government has been keeping a register of mental illness cases since 1916, and its records are the world's best for a homogeneous, stable population. Among U.S. immigrants, and their descendants, from Mediterranean countries, a mysterious, periodic fever, easily mistaken for hepatitis or mononucleosis. is not uncommon. PHS has allotted $107,000 to researchers headed by Dr. Harry Heller in Tel Aviv, where familial Mediterranean fever is rife. In the U.S.. where there is no comparable concentration of patients, such research would cost at least three or four times as much. Half a world away, Peruvian Indians have lived for centuries on low oxygen concentrations in the high Andes. To learn more about what this has done to their hearts and lungs, and what happens when they go down to the low level at Lima, PHS is backing research by Physiologist Alberto Hurtado. U.S. spacemen are looking anxiously over his shoulder for the answers.

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