BRAZIL: Men In White

Except for a fine old stucco church on the weed-grown plaza, the sleepy rubber town of Cametá has only two noteworthy buildings: a nondescript, 10-ft.-square structure housing a brand-new well, and a little white municipal health center. Both are the work of a joint U.S.-Brazilian organization called Servico Especial de Saude Publica (Special Public Health Service).

When SESP came to Cametá in 1944, the town’s 550 families were getting their drinking water from the silt-laden Tocantins River. Their only plumbing facilities were the jungle bush behind their rickety shacks. Cametá had no doctor, and there is no record of how many Cametenses died each year from dysentery, hookworm, malaria and typhus, but these and other communicable diseases accounted for 55% of all deaths in the Amazon region which includes Cametá.

Now, from. SESP’s new well, safe drinking water is carried through Brazilian-made pipes to faucets spotted across the town. There are SESP-built privies behind the houses. DDT has even made it possible to sleep without a mosquito net.

And in the antiseptic-smelling medical center, a staff of 14 SESP doctors and technicians are working on a program that has already rid the town of malaria, of nearly all hookworm, and cut the remaining cases of amoebic dysentery to 24.

Other Towns. The story of Cametá can be repeated in 89 other towns and villages in the green sweep of the Amazon Valley, and 81 more in the Rio Doce Valley far to the south. SESP has built and staffed three fine hospitals and Brazil’s best nursing school. It has also built 42 health posts, 14,000 privies, and a dike at Belem that has reclaimed 5,000 acres of land from the sea. Over a two-year period in the Amazon, SESP doctors have made 297,000 medical examinations, 143,000 laboratory examinations, administered 156,000 treatments.

An outgrowth of the wartime U.S. interest in the Amazon’s rubber and the Rio Doce’s iron and mica, SESP is run jointly by the Brazilian Ministry of Health & Education and the U.S. State Department’s Institute of Inter-American Affairs. It is jointly headed by Brazil’s curt, round-faced Dr. Marcolino Candau, 37, a Johns-Hopkins-trained carioca, and by IIAA’s quietly competent Dr. Eugene Campbell, 41, also a Hopkins product.

More Money. Despite its achievements and its obvious value in good will for the U.S., SESP has had its bumps from the economy-minded U.S. Congress. IIAA’s appropriation has been halved, and the agency’s power to contract with foreign governments limited to one year. Next winter, the new U.S. Congress may wipe out IIAA altogether.

But in Brazil it is political suicide to oppose SESP. This week the finance committee of the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies meets to debate the Health Ministry’s 1949 budget, which includes 40 million cruzeiros ($2,000,000) for SESP. The SESP item is almost certain to be un touched. Too many Brazilians agree with Rio Physician Dr. Kenneth Waddell: “The only possible criticism of SESP is that there is not enough of it.”