REACTIONS TO COLD

Press, Volume XCVI, Issue 28450, 3 December 1957, Page 9

REACTIONS TO COLD

Study Of Men In Antarctic [From DENIS W EDERELL, “The Press'' Correspondent with the U.S. Antarctic expedition.] LITTLE AMERICA, Nov. 24. While others studied the Antarctic, Mr Frederick Milan spent his winter here studying the men who studied the Antarctic —and the men who maintained the base where they lived and worked. Mr Milan, a physiologist, is from the Arctic Aeromedical Laboratory at Fairbanks, Alaska. His project was to investigate human acclimatisation to cold. He had a small group of volunteers, some of them men who regularly worked outside, others whose work was inside.

Three times during the winter each of his volunteers underwent a morning in his laboratory, having his temperature and respiration checked for several hours. The first 30 minutes was before breakfast.

Breakfast on . those days was something like a glass of orange juice and two or three biscuits. Then the patient would lie, stripped, on a plastic stretcher with thermometers taped to various parts of the body, all the while growing colder and colder. “They had to lie there for two hours,” said Mr Milan. “To break the boredom I usually played some music for them.”

After that they dressed again and had lunch. Later, usually on another day, they would follow a routine of set exercises—such as stepping up and down on to a low step for seveial minutes—while their temperature and energy consumption was measured. Another routine was to carry a pack with the instruments on their backs and go for a walk around the camp, or climb up the hill from Crevasse Valley, about half a mile away. Food Intake Measured

For a week each man’s food intake was measured precisely at every meal. “Appetites vary a lot,” said Mr Milan. “People eat for various reasons—not only because they are hungry. Oral pleasures, as we call them, are often a strong influence. Men eat just for the pleasure of eating.” The main advantage to be gained from this type of research in the Antarctic, said Mr Milan, was that the men were here longer without outside contacts. In the Arctic there were more short-service postings, and this often interrupted experiments or •o compressed them that their usefulness was lessened.