Medicine: No More Martyrs?

In New Haven last week, Warren G. Dugan, a conscientious objector, who had been working on polio in Yale’s laboratories, died of it.

During the past ten years, 130 Public Health Service workers have sickened, and a dozen have died from diseases under study at the Government-owned National Institute of Health. Among them:

¶ Last autumn, 30-year-old Dr. Richard Henderson, trying to find a vaccine for scrub typhus, died of the disease.*

¶ Laboratory Assistant Rose Parrott, the Institute’s first woman worker, died of tularemia (rabbit fever) last autumn, ten days after she was to have been retired after 30 years’ service. She had not even entered the room where tularemia work was done. (Most tularemia workers get it sooner or later.)

¶ Laboratory Worker Harry Anderson died in 1930 of psittacosis (parrot fever).

¶ Aca Marcey, who cleaned the cages where infected animals were kept for study, died of Q fever (a disease related to typhus) in 1940 after 20 years at a dangerous job.

In Bethesda, Md., last week the Institute was building a unique, three-story, 200-by-46 foot laboratory designed to prevent such accidents.

The deaths of Dr. Henderson and Rose Parrott, within six weeks of each other, had spurred Congress into appropriating the money. The lab will be divided into six isolated sections, each devoted to a single type of disease (e.g., tularemia, scrub typhus, influenza, fungus infections). Reporting for work, each Institute employe will doff his street clothes in one room, put on laboratory clothes in another. He will handle germs by slipping rubber-gloved hands into hand holes, under a carefully ventilated glass hood. The automatically sterilized animal rooms will be arranged so that air blows from the worker toward the animals, never the other way. On leaving at night, the worker will shed his laboratory gear, wash, examine his body for ticks in a six-sided mirror, put on his civvies and go home feeling as safe as any germ-worker can.

* Production of a preventive vaccine in England has just been announced. U.S. results are still a military secret.