Medicine: Capsules

¶For its next test of mass inoculations with gamma globulin as a protection against the paralyzing aftereffects of poliomyelitis, the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis picked the area around Sioux City (Woodbury County, Iowa, and Dakota County, Neb.). It hoped to give the needle this week to 16,500 youngsters, aged one to eleven.

¶ In Houston, where the big G.G. test was made (TIME, July 14), authorities still had a many-pointed problem: what to do with 33,127 syringes. Though they were intended to be discarded after use, care had to be taken lest they fall into the hands of dope addicts. Somebody suggested dropping them down a 5,000-ft. oil boring, then sealing it with concrete. Last week they were melted down in a 2,000° incinerator, then the vitreous mass with needles embedded in it was buried under ten feet of garbage.

¶ Many a country doctor has a machine which will make fine electrocardiograms, but reading them takes extra skill for which a general practitioner usually calls on a specialist. Now, three researchers in Omaha have perfected a preamplifier which turns the patient’s weak, direct-current impulses into strong FM signals which can be transmitted over an ordinary telephone and charted at the other end of the line by a heart specialist. The G.P. and the specialist can discuss the patient’s heart waves over the same line.

¶ At the halfway mark in its twelve-month job of finding out what needs to be done to jack up U.S. medical facilities, the President’s Commission on Health Needs of the Nation (TIME, Jan. 14) took advice from Harry Truman himself. It decided to go on the road, hold “whistle stop” public hearings in eight major cities beginning next month. In most places, organized doctors were lukewarm to the idea, but in Houston they boiled over, denounced the commission as a political maneuver and a waste of time & money. The commission figured its Texas hearing might have to be held in Dallas.