Medicine: Plagues of China

What epidemiologists expected ever since the Japanese began to bombard China’s big cities—disrupting sanitary systems, interrupting food supplies and turning the cities into armed camps filled with large concentrations of men—by last week was in full swing. Plagues were everywhere rampant, particularly cholera. This cause of black vomit & death was dropping 100 a day in Shanghai’s International Settlement alone.

Occidental Governments so fear the spread of China’s pestilences that the U. S. Public Health Service has an outpost at Hong Kong, which last week reported the main foci of the epidemic as in Shanghai, Hong Kong, Canton, Hoihow, Macao. Amoy and Foochow were being scrutinized closely. The League of Nations has established a central observation post in Singapore, and last week the League’s observers reported that refugees from the coast were spreading cholera inland. At the League of Nations’ Geneva headquarters last week, its watchful Health Committee warned: “Repercussions which might become serious internationally as well as nationally are to be expected if the [war] disturbances cause a breakdown in the quarantine services and thus lead to the transmission of plague infection by sea.”

Calling attention to typhus, smallpox, typhoid, dysentery, meningitis, diphtheria, tuberculosis and venereal disease, the League’s Health Committee pessimistically declared: “The diseases enumerated above do not exhaust the list of possible epidemics which may result from military operations in China or from their repercussions.” Dr. Victor Hoo Chi-tsai, China’s representative on the Health Committee, asked that anti-epidemic units be sent to China without delay. For this the League’s Assembly immediately provided $500,000.

As for the self-protection of the U. S.. Surgeon General Parran of the Public Health Service comfortably announced: “It is not believed by Public Health Service quarantine officers that the west coast seaports of the United States are likely to become infected, for the reason that, since the incubation period of cholera is only five days, outbreaks on shipboard will occur and the disease will become manifest long before a ship from infected ports could reach any United States seaport. However, the possibility of introduction of the disease by carrier is not being overlooked, and bacteriological search is being conducted for carriers whenever indicated. Ships from cholera-infected areas are not granted radio pratique.* Through passengers from infected areas traveling by Pan American Clipper airships will probably not be inconvenienced, since they will have completed the incubation period by the time they reach San Francisco, but those stopping off en route will be held at stopover points to complete the incubation period.”

* Permission to pass through quarantine without pausing for medical inspection, if the ship doctor radios ahead that he has no serious disease aboard (TIME, Sept. 6 et ante).