CONQUEST OF DYSENTERY

Evening Star, Issue 23123, 24 November 1938, Page 11

CONQUEST OF DYSENTERY

ITALY'S DEBT TO FRANCE Italy and France are still glaring into each other’s eyes across the Alpine passes. Yet, if there were such a thing as the gratitude of peoples, France would be the best friend of Italy in Europe. For the success of her Abyssinian campaign Italy owes an immense debt to a great Frenchman. But for the discoveries made during the battle of Verdun Italy’s Abyssinian expedition might have been utterly different (writes a contributor to he London ‘Sunday Times’). During the long years one of the deadliest enemies of all colonial expeditions has been dysentery. Last May the Inspector-General of the Italian Army and Navy Sanitary Service, Aldo Castillani, read before the Royal Society of Arts a striking report on the havoo wrought by dysentery 'during the three great colonial expeditions of the World War. At Gallipoli the effectives numbered 116,838; the cases of dysentery were 29,728. In the Macedonian expedition the figures were 24,245 cases of dysentery for 128,747 troops; while in the two East African expeditions of 1916 and 1917, out of 108,816 effectives, 22,947 fell victims to the malady. In a word, out of every 100 men 22 were rendered hors de combat by illness. , . Now, the Italian army an Ethiopia numbered 500.000. Some 110,000 were normally bound to suffer from dysentery, in which circumstance the army’s victorious advance on Addis Ababa would have been seriously hampered. What were the facts? Instead of having to deal with a gigantic epidemic of dysentery, the Italian army doctors ti'eatcd only 453 cases! How to account for this remarkable result? The answer is that in 1916. at the beginning of the battle of Verdun, the danger of dysentery became suddenly so menacing, with the arrival of infected Indo-Chinese troops, that drastic measures were imperative. A French major of engineers, Colonel Philippe Bunau-Varilla —the - famous constructor, moreover, of the Panama Canal—chanced then to be in charge of the water supplies of the Verdun sector. He undertook the study of the purification of the local water se r vices from an entirely new point of view

After several experiments he discovered that chlorine could be used with great success in quantities from 30 to 150 times smaller than those that had hitherto been universally proclaimed to be indispensable. With these minute quantities, providing _ that the introduction of _ the chlorine was followed by a violent agitation of the liquid, purification became instantaneous. The system thus discovered—-which has received the name of “ Verdnnisation ” —has reduced the mortality in Paris of children and young people up to the age of 20 by 56 'per cent. In the colonies the chlorine can be used in the form of a salt, known as chlorsmaine, that is sufficiently stable and produces, in. contact with water, a free chlorine. Indeed, tabloids of chloramaine have been for some time now made in Franco for the instant purification of a litre of water.

It was this method that the Italians adopted in their Ethiopian campaign, with the extraordinary results noted. According to Colonel Bunau-Varilla, who bases his theory on repeated experiments, the purifying action of chlorine in “ Verduuisation ” is duo to the emission of ultra-violet rays, which not merely kill the dangerous germs, hut positively transform them, making them vitamin carriers and increasing resistance to disease. The theory would appear to ho proved by the fact that the Italian army was uot only most immune from dysentery, but had an astonishingly small number of deaths from sickness—namely, loss than 1.100 for an army of 500,000 during a campaign of seven months!