MARTYRS TO SCIENCE.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue 156, 3 July 1937, Page 6 (Supplement)

MARTYRS TO SCIENCE.

Yellou) Jack" and its Deadly Allies.

OUR DEBT TO FEVER RESEARCH HEROES.

(By WILLIAM C. McCLOY.) No. 111.

NEW YORK, May IT. YELLOW fever's most recent martyrs, four in number—Theodore B. Hayne in 1930, Paul A. Lewis in 1929, Jlideyo Noguchi in 1928, and Adrian Stokes in 1927—a1l contributed richly to our knowledge of the disease. Dr. Hayne was a young and promising South Carolinian of distinguished medical ancestry. As a boy, from 10 to 18, he spent his summer vacations in anti-n.alaria w.jrk. He died in Nigeria after only four days' illness. His African researches were of great importance to science in general and to yellow fever specifically. Dr. Lewis, from Chicago, had been but six months at Bahia, Brazil, when stricken with the malady he was studying. His notes and records preserving his laboratory findings have the highest value. Dr. Noguchi, recipient of many honours and honorary degrees, was a member of numerous scientific societies in the United States and foreign countries. In 1024, he received the medal of the Society of the Japanese, ranking him as one of the ten greatest Japanese. He died in West Africa and, as an investigator of the relation between South American and African yellow fever, his work has outstanding significance. Dr. Stokes also died in West Africa, at Lagos, where Wakeman, a young American chemical pathologist of importance, was stricken, dying on his way home and being buried at sea. Of an Irish family already famous in medicine, Dr. Stokes' death was the direct result of a too eager interest in his subject and too little regard for his own personal safety. His yellow fever investigations have proved of great practical as well as theoretical value. New Source of Infection. Jungle yellow fever, which these men were investigating, is not a variation of the original flisease. It represents a new and hitherto unsuspected source of infection—the most important development of the yellow fever problem in recent years. Prior to 1929, the Rockefeller Foundation's published reports stated that yellow fever was fast disappearing, that it had, indeed, practically disappeared. In 1925, only three cases were reported in the entire western hemisphere. In the eleven months following April, 1927, no cases were reported at all and it seemed as though the campaign that had cost the lives of so many research workers and million! of dollars was won.

Then, suddenly, came jungle yellow fever—cases contracted in South America and West Africa, where there were no mosquitoes nor other known cause for the disease. In parts «f Brazil—high, dry parts with no swamps, stagnant water or other orthodox breeding places—yellow fever abounds. Infected wild monkeys are now known .to be one source of this new and mysterious phase of the malady, with other agents not yet identified. Natives are more or less immune, but white men are easily susceptible, though the laboratories each year are more successful in protecting their research workers with experimental vaccine.

To the layman, it looks as though the lower forms of life were more adaptable than is generally realised. Typhus germs, when discouraged from "using lice as carriers, contentedly transfer themselves to fleas, while fleas, with black rats no longer available, accommodate themselves to brown rats with impartiality and success. In the absence of mosquitoes, the intrepid yellow fever germ has apparently persuaded some other insect to carry him —at least, in the jungles of South America and Africa. During the last year Bellevue Hospital, New York, opened its first laboratory for the study of tropical ami subtropical diseases. And, on April 1 last, Surgeon-General Farran warned that the aeroplane has brought the United States within four days of Brazilian ports. Aeroplanes are making inland towns as cosmopolitan as seaports, and among tlio cosmopolites who appreciate travel are insects and microbes. Like crcatures of a Mickey Mouse cartoon, they have hitch-hiked across the country, boarded aeroplanes and brought possible infection and positive terror to all parts of the globe. Mosquitoes painted red and blue in Brazil arrived by 'plane in Texas with flying colours, so that they could be scientifically recognised. No port authority, no immigration officers can stop or stay these most undesirable of aliens. As successful Btowawayß, upon fast airships (mosquitoes languish and die upon sea ships), they have no equal. Unknown in Europe and Asia. Ever since the first Blave ship brought yellow fever to Central America from Africa 300 years ago, it has been a menace to North and South America. Neither Europe nor Asia knows yellow fever yet. It would be particularly dangerous in Asia, where sanitation of the simplest sort is hard to enforce, and Asiatics have developed no immunity as Africans seem to have done. Because of religious scruples, Hindus would no doubt object to massacring mosquitoes, as Walter Reed did in Cuba; they might be somebody's grandmother. (Only the female mosquito is a carrier.) Of the (iOO varieties of mosquitoes in Cuba, only one in those early days was counted as a carrier. It is now known that there are 13 varieties of mosquitoes all over the world capable of distributing yellow fever. In 20S years yellow fever came ninetyfive times to the United States. In Philadelphia in 1793 only three physicians were able to attend the 6000 cases. All the other doctors were ill. In the 1798 yellow fever epidemic in New York sixteen out of 6ixty doctors lost their lives. Geographically, the high water mark of this tropical disease was the typically cool and clean New Kngland town of Portsmouth, New H:i mpshire. Havana had yellow fever regularly every summer until September, 1901. the first month the city had been free from the scourge in 150 years. More American soldiers died from yellow fever during the Spanish-American war than upon the battlefield.

Mosquito Theory Discredited. Dr. Louis D. Beauperthuy, a French physician living in Venezuela, in 1853, was the fimt to say that mosquitoes caused yellow fever. The Government commission appointed to investigate hits claims all but declared him insane. It ir? a matter of record that Walter Reed himself and his devoted little band of pioneers were sceptical of the moequito theory. But they had young and open minds; they were morally as well as physically courageous and they were sincerely in search of the truth. Dr. Lazear was the only one of the Reed staff to die during the investigations. Early in the experiments he permitted himself to be bitten by a mosquito, but with no ill effects. One day, at a moment when his right hand was holding a test tube, a mosquito lighted upon his left hand. He didn't want to drop the test tube and he had been immune before, so he let the mosquito bite him—but this time he caught yellow fever and died. There can be no calculating in words or figures the value of the work done by Walter Reed and his associates in Cuba, aided and abetted by General Gorgas and Governor General Leonard Wood. To appreciate what it means to have yellow fever under control and what it would mean should the new jungle yellow fever get beyond control, we have but to realise the commercial, aesthetic and social advantages that have come to certain localities since Walter Reed's time. Not only the Panama Canal, but the prosperity and pleasure of Palm Beach and Miami, New Orleans and Southern California—and much more—have been made possible only through the elimination of yellow fever.—N.A.N.A.