Doctor Invites Disfigurement

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31597, 7 February 1968, Page 5

Doctor Invites Disfigurement

(N.Z.P.A. -Reuter—Copyright)

LONDON, February 6.

A British doctor who infects himself with a disfiguring tropical disease is returning to the jungles of Brazil to be bitten again by the sandfly carriers of the disease.

Dr R. Lainson, who uses himself as a guinea pig to study the dreaded affliction, has received a grant of £36,000 to continue his work.

He is studying leishmaniasis, a disease which can eat away a man’s nose, ears and palate. “You can’t ask people to do this unless you are willing to do it youself,” the 40-year-old doctor, a married man with three children, said today. Dr Lainson first injected himself with the disease in 1961, and it took six months of prolonged treatment with

anti-histamines and a new antibiotic to cure it. “But we had it under control,” Dr Lainson said. Then he went back to Brazil, stripped off his shirt and walked into the forest to be bitten again by the sandfly carriers. The parasite can lie dormant for years and takes 25 years to destroy an organ. In parts of Brazil leishmaniasis is so prevalent that mining and logging companies dismiss workers who go into the forests.

Dr Lainson, who works with a colleague, Dr J. Shaw, at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, will return to the mouth of the Amazon River in a few weeks’ time to continue his research.