Medicine: Polio’s Little Brother?

The symptoms of the disease that brought Dr. Joe Albert Risser hurrying to his office in little (pop. 7,043) Bonham, Texas early on the morning of July 31 sounded a good deal like those of polio. The local druggist had a fever of 101, was pale and sweating, had sharp, constricting pains in his chest muscles. When an examination showed nothing wrong, Dr. Risser gave him a sedative and sent him home. Within four hours, the druggist called again. The pains had stopped, he said, and he felt fine, just a little tired.

Twenty-four hours later, the druggist was stricken again, this time less severely. The druggist’s wife came down with the same symptoms; so did his three children. More patients fell ill. Dr. Risser got six frantic calls in one day. By mid-August, Bonham was in the grip of an epidemic. The cases were all the same: two swift, polio-like attacks followed by rapid recovery. Dr. Risser, a former Army epidemiologist, consulted his medical books, wrote the U.S. Public Health Service that Bonham had been hit by epidemic pleurodynia (“devil’s grip”), probably caused by an elusive virus known as Coxsackie.

Complete Recoveries. Coxsackie has been studied so seldom that doctors know almost nothing about it. A similar disease was noted in Europe in the 1870s; doctors called it epidemic muscular rheumatism. In the 1880s, an epidemic struck Bornholm Island, off the coast of Sweden; it was dubbed Bornholm’s Disease. In 1947, some of the patients in a polio epidemic in the Hudson River town of Coxsackie, N.Y. turned out to have an altogether different virus. The doctors who isolated the new bug named it the Coxsackie virus. The Coxsackie study showed that the virus had many of the earmarks of polio, but none of its virulence. The disease attacked mostly children and young adults, disappeared with the first frost. There were no deaths and recovery was complete. Beyond that, doctors knew little.

8,000 to 1. By last week, the epidemic of Coxsackie in Texas had spread beyond Bonham to other parts of Fannin County. Close to 8,000 people, one out of every five, had gotten it, and Texans claimed that it was the biggest epidemic of Coxsackie ever recorded. The National Institute of Health had a special team on the spot to get specimens of saliva, blood, and urine for lab analysis. Doctors speculated that the Coxsackie virus might act as a deterrent to polio. Only one case has been reported in Fannin County this summer.

But in Washington, the U.S. Public Health Service was keeping a guarded silence. The disease is so little known and so like a mild case of polio that Washington was not even sure that the Texas epidemic actually is Coxsackie and, if it is, whether that is good or bad.