Medicine: Hoard for Drugs

When the U. S. Government moved its great gold hoard into the underground strongboxes at Fort Knox, Ky., it left vacant a number of gold vaults in the U. S. Treasury in Washington. Last week the Public Health Service used these to start another kind of hoard—drugs, especially drugs which World War II has made more & more difficult to import. High on this list is quinine, most of which is imported from the war-threatened Netherlands East Indies. Others: opium, morphine.

If U. S. soldiers ever have to fight in Central or South America, large quantities of yellow-fever vaccine will be needed. The U. S. hoard of that must start almost from scratch. Surgeon General Thomas Parran recently observed that there was hardly enough yellow-fever vaccine actually on hand to immunize a single regiment.