MOROCCO: The Malady of Meknes

MOROCCO The Malady of MeknesCripples, many of them children, stretched helpless legs last week in the bazaars of Meknes (pop. 200,000). In the city’s 4O0-bed hospital, some 650 more Moroccans, with symptoms ranging from muscular atrophy of hands and feet to complete paralysis, lay crammed together in crowded quarters. In the Meknes slums, whole families hobbled about on canes. “There are 10,000 people paralyzed,” cried Morocco’s Health Minister Youssef ben

Abbes after a tour of Meknes, “and there are at least 30,000 made destitute, physically helpless to earn a living for themselves and their families.”

The poison that had caused the paralysis could be traced, in a way, back to the U.S. Air Force, but even leftist critics, who have been successful in forcing the U.S. to abandon its $500 million complex of bases in Morocco, were hesitant about putting the blame on the Americans. The real villain was the greed of a few Moroccan businessmen.

Something Added. In accordance with U.S. policy of auctioning off instead of carting away unwanted supplies, the Air Force last summer sold 40 tons of surplus airplane lubricating oil to a Casablanca dealer. The dealer then sold the oil to 25 cooking-oil merchants of Meknes, Fez and Casablanca, who posed as garage owners. The merchants mixed the bargain-price lubricating oil with olive oil in a 1-to-4 ratio that enabled them to boost by 75% their profit on the cheap cooking oil that the poorest Moroccan families use. Ready to cheat, if not perhaps intending what happened, the merchants did not know that the American lubricating oil contained an anti-corrosive additive (tri-ortho cresyl phosphate), two grams of which, taken orally, are enough to cause paralysis of arms and legs.

This was the same old adulterant that, added by U.S. bootleggers to their “Jamaica Jake” (a drink made with tincture of ginger), caused something like 20,000 paralysis cases in Prohibition days in Ohio, Kansas and other Midwest and Southern states. About the only good thing to say for the stuff is that it is almost never fatal.

Something Done. After spending several weeks of detective work to trace the mysterious outbreak to its common source, the Moroccan government ap pealed to the International Red Cross for help. Moroccan police placed all cooking-oil stocks under their control, stopped sales of the poison stuff (and the spread of the paralysis) outside the Meknes area. They also jailed the 25 merchants. King Mohammed V, whose powers are unlimited by any parliamentary control, put out a royal edict decreeing death for “crimes against the health of the nation,” and making the edict retroactive to cover the poison-oil case. “The merchants should be made to fry in their own oil,” growled a cop in Meknes last week, as he watched the cripples hobble through slum streets.