Medicine: Polio and Lungs

Chicago’s impecunious Board of Education this summer found $900,000 to enable public schools to open a week ahead of time (see p. 22). But the continued prevalence of infantile paralysis in the city last week gave a good excuse to postpone the opening.

Thus far this year about 5,000 children of the nation have developed poliomyelitis. By this time last year about 2,000 children had it. But the difference does not alarm epidemiologists of the U. S. Public Health Service, who call the current occurrence a “mild epidemic,” because its cases are diffused over the entire Mississippi Valley and Great Lakes region, reaching into Canada. Nonetheless, local health officers are worried. Communities are postponing school terms, forbidding children to attend theatres, go to parks, go in swimming pools.

Toronto, with 327 cases of polio thus far last week became the first community on the continent to test the worth of the Peet-Schultz prophylactic nasal spray (TIME Sept. 6 et ante), by applying it to a significant number of children. Led by the Hospital for Sick Children, all the city’s hospitals opened clinics for application of the spray. Soon as newspapers announced the fact, 5,000 parents brought children to get the treatment.

By last week imaginative doctors figured out a way of making the spray effective in small children whose nostrils are too narrow to admit the tip of an atomizer. An extra amount of the protective solution is sprayed into the lower part of the child’s nares. Then for a moment the child is held upside down, thus causing the liquid to flow against the nerves of smell which must be covered, if the virus of infantile paralysis is to be kept from invading the brain and spine.

Toronto during the past fortnight was also the scene of some mechanical ingenuity. Hospital for Sick Children had only one mechanical respirator, and needed at least one more. The only professional manufacturers of this life-saving device are: Warren E. Collins, Inc. of Boston, which makes respirators designed by Professor Philip Drinker of Harvard’s School of Public Health; and J. H. Emerson Co. of Cambridge, Mass., owned by John Haven Emerson, inventive son and namesake of New York City’s onetime commissioner of health. The two companies long quarreled over patent infringements. Meanwhile, since 1929 only 250 Drinker respirators have been manufactured (price: $1,350 to $2,450), and since 1931 only 30 Emerson respirators (price: $1,000 to $1,600). Neither firm keeps many respirators in stock.

Faced with these conditions, Superintendent Joseph Henry Winteringham Bower of Toronto’s Hospital for Children, a civil engineer by training, fortnight ago determined to build a duplicate of a Drinker respirator. All that was required was an airtight container out of which air could be intermittently pumped to inflate the patient’s lungs, Superintendent Bower summoned his chief engineer, Harry Balmforth, and his carpenter William Hall. With pine boards, three hinges from a trunk, some metal rings, a rubber sheet, an air hose and a vacuum pump, they did the job. The work took only seven hours The cost was negligible because they used any old thing available. Before this “wooden lung was long in use. Denver set up a wail for a respirator. Two little girls there were taking turns dying without aid of the city’s only respirator. Toronto heeded the plea, sent the wooden device. In spite of its use, one of the Denver children died.

Last week Messrs. Bower, Balmforth and Hall, with money provided by theOntario government, were busily building six steel replicas of their wooden respirators. Final cost for each respirator will be less than $500.