Hunt At Pools For “Mystery Disease”

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31724, 6 July 1968, Page 14

Hunt At Pools For “Mystery Disease”

(New Zealand Press Association) HAMILTON, July 5. Four Waikato youths who all died within 10 days of swimming at the Crystal Hot Springs, Matamata, are believed to have succumbed to a mysterious form of meningitis, possibly contracted there.

Two senior scientists from Palmerston North will investigate the springs next week in an attempt to isolate an extremely rare amoeba, believed to have caused the illness. The proprietor of the Crystal Hot Springs, Mr C. J. Graham. has voluntarily closed his resort until it is cleared by the Department of Health of any involvement in the mystery disease. But he said: “About 100,000 persons use these pools every year, and to think that these four unfortunate youths contracted this disease here is statistically ridiculous.” Amoeba Sought The amoeba the scientists will be looking for is a soil

organism which attacks the brains of humans, and is believed to gain entry through the nose.

fore the results of the inves. tigations going on in three countries will bear results. Mr Graham, at his luxurymotel and mineral-pools resort, said he firmly believed the investigations would ultimately clear his pools of any Involvement in the disease.

Dr J. F. Dawson, medical officer of health at Hamilton, says that although no other evidence linking the Crystal Hot Springs with the youths’ deaths has been found, the fact that all four had swum there not long before dying is “very strong circumstantial evidence.” The Waikato Hospital Board’s superintendent in chief, Dr J. A. Meade, confirmed today that tissue samples from the latest victim, a seven-year-old boy who died earlier this week, had been sent to the United States for comparison by experts there. Dr Meade said the symptoms of the victims made it obvious they were suffering from meningo-encephalitis—-but they did not fit into any known form of the disease. Intensive investigations had been carried but before the patients died, and afterwards in autopsy. It was only after the last victim died that pathologists at the Waikato Hospital became “reasonably confident” that an amoeba—which was only discovered to be harmful to humans in 1965—was involved. Two Other Outbreaks Through medical journals and other reports, the Health Department knows of only two other outbreaks of this disease—if in fact it is the same one. Seven persons died in the United States, in West Virginia, from a rare form of meningo-encephalitis last year—all had been swimming in lakes and ponds—and another outbreak was recorded in South Australia, where four persons are believed to have died.

“I would be quite prepared to swim in the pools myself right now,” he said. Mr Graham says he has spent up to 40 hours in one week working in the pools, up to his neck in the now-suspect waters.

Tissue samples have been sent from the Waikato Hospital to the experts in West Virginia who dealt with that outbreak, and a Wellington scientist at present in Australia, has been asked to contact the two doctors who reported the disease there. Dr Dawson says he has no idea how long it will be be-