“CHERRY” BLIND
SOLDIERS LOSE SIGHT STRANGE NEW GUINEA FRUIT (Rec. 10 p.m.) LONDON, Dec. 20. Twenty-seven soldiers who ate “ cherries ” in New Guinea and became totally blind as a result, have arrived back in Britain. According to Dr C. D. Torvell, scientific adviser to the forces in the Far East, in a speech to the Liverpool Rotary Club, science has so far found no means of restoring their sight. The nickname for the fruit was “finger cherry.” It looked and tasted like an ordinary cherry. Eating one or two caused no harmful effects, but as many as nine or ten induced total blindness within a few hours. The army authorities, when they discovered this, destroyed as many “ cherry ” trees as possible with arsenic. The peculiar properties of t,h° trees were realised only at the end of 1942.
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Otago Daily Times, Issue 26033, 22 December 1945, Page 7
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137“CHERRY” BLIND Otago Daily Times, Issue 26033, 22 December 1945, Page 7
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