Word: cholera
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Tougher & Faster. El Tor, long underestimated, is now bullying "classical" cholera off the map. In the British Medical Journal, Calcutta's Dr. Sachimohan Mukerjee reports evidence that if old-fashioned cholera and El Tor bacilli are put into the same test tube or invade the same human victim, El Tor will completely crowd out the "classical" vibrios. Not only is it a tougher bug; it also spreads faster. And a recovered El Tor victim may remain a menace by continuing to excrete the bacilli for as long as six months, as against a mere three weeks after classical cholera...
Complete prevention of cholera by cleaning up or isolating contaminated water supplies-a more effective method of prevention than the wearing of fantastic anti-cholera costumes with a windmill on the hat (see cut]-no longer seems feasible. El Tor bacilli have spread too far, over millions of square miles. Vaccination would seem to be the next best step, but after 80 years experts still cannot agree on how good the vaccines are, or how to make the best one. Though injections of killed bacilli, as in the vaccines now generally used, stimulate the production of antibody in the blood...
...International Congress of Military Medicine in Bangkok last month, Dr. Richard A. Finkelstein of the SEATO Medical Research Laboratory suggested that it might be possible to make another type of vaccine. This would work against a chemical poison produced by cholera bacilli that seem to trigger the damage in the intestinal wall. This impairment in turn cause cholera's devastating symptom: the most severe diarrhea known to man, in which an adult may lose up to 15 quart a day while running little or no fever...
Even the enthusiastic vaccinators agree, however, that the vaccines currently used offer regrettably short-term protection (probably not more than six months), and that the people most likely to contract cholera are the least likely to get vaccinated...
...been a single case among U.S. forces. This relative safety comes partly from luck, the medics concede, and partly from the fact that the old-fashioned vaccine they are now using seems to confer some protection against El Tor. The most important reason, say the doctors, is that cholera, like smallpox, rarely takes hold unless its victim is debilitated...