Medicine: Dangerous Souvenir

The hand grenades and mortar shells brought home by World War II veterans are not the only souvenirs which sometimes blow up later. Sergeant Wilson Posie Noles, an Air Force ground crewman from 1942 to 1945, found that microscopic, disease-causing organisms, unknowingly picked up, can behave the same way.

Somewhere along the line from Algeria to Tunisia to Sicily to Italy, Noles was bitten by a sand flea. In southern Italy he came down with aches, chills and fever. Doctors said it was malaria, and dosed him with quinine. Off & on, after settling down again at home in La Grange, Ga., Veteran Noles kept getting his old aches and fevers. He had no pep, lost 25 Ibs.

At Lawson Veterans Administration Hospital in Atlanta, report Dr. William J. Senter and two colleagues in the current American Journal of Medicine, Noles was found to have kala-azar, a disease unknown in the U.S. until just before the war. Some symptoms of kala-azar are like those of malaria, but the invading parasite is different: a protozoon named Leishmania donovani. Once diagnosed, the disease is easily treated with daily injections of ethylstibamine, an,antimony compound. Noles went home after six weeks, pronounced cured.

Kala-azar is found in the Mediterranean basin, in India (where it got its name, meaning black disease), China and Brazil. Prewar cases in the U.S. were mostly Lascar seamen or visitors from the Orient. Then scores of U.S. servicemen caught the disease. Many cases may still be lurking in veterans’ bloodstreams as “undiagnosed fever.” U.S. doctors have been alerted against it.

Though it is fatal in 90% to 95% of untreated cases, kala-azar can nearly always be cured with antimony compounds.