MEDICINE: Vaginitis

In New York City 1,000 girls under the age of 10 are annually forbidden to attend school lest they infect other little girls with vaginitis. Fortnight ago Director William Freeman Snow of the American Social Hygiene Association collated data to show that in the nation there are 200,000 children known to be similarly infected. Actually the cause of vaginitis is gonorrhea which children contract usually by contact with their older sisters or mothers. Dr. Snow hoped that by publishing his statistics he might arouse the U. S. to a new sector of the venereal front now under attack by public health authorities.

Adult women resist infection by gonococci because their sex membranes are relatively impervious. Children have very little such protection. Germs work into their tissues where germicidal douches cannot reach. In spite of treatment the disease may last as long as five years. The cure for vaginitis is only four years old. In January 1934, at Yale. Dr. Robert Lewis took a hint from Dr. Edgar Allen, who found that female sex hormones toughened the vaginal mucosa of monkeys. Dr. Lewis gave eight infected children hypodermic doses of theelin, a sex hormone, and cured them in a few weeks. A few months later Dr. John Huberman of Newark, N. J. and Dr. Howard Harry Israeloff of nearby Irvington, collaborating, gave five children hypodermic injections of amniotin. an extract of the fluids in which unborn children float. They gave a sixth child amniotin by mouth. All six got rid of their gonorrhea in a few months.

Treatment is now standardized to include theelin hypodermically and amniotin in vaginal suppositories. The most resistant cases clear up in at the most six months. The treatment, said Dr. Snow, “produces a temporary maturity of the vaginal mucosa. and occasionally a trifling enlargement of the breasts. But these phenomena subside immediately after the vaginitis is cured and treatment ended. No child has ever suffered harm.”