Word: diphtheria
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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From the U.S. Public Health Service last week came a warning: diphtheria is on the rise. The number of cases, 10,335 so far this year, was not alarming, but it was some 2,500 above the recent norm, reversed a 25-year trend...
...Diphtheria. In Gateshead, England, which has had severe diphtheria epidemics (2,911 cases, 147 deaths) during the past ten years, Dr. Richard J. Dodds tried heavy doses of penicillin (besides diphtheria antitoxin) on a test group of 13 hard-hit patients. One died, but the rest recovered more rapidly and with fewer complications than patients who got only antitoxin...
...Diphtheria is one contagious, infectious disease that doctors have just about learned to control. Even so, there was an approximate 30% rise in cases in the U.S. last year. UNRRA called diphtheria Europe's "leading epidemic disease" since 1942. In Japan, diphtheria continued to claim new victims. U.S. Public Health officials shook their heads, clucked warningly, advised 100% child inoculation...
Inoculation is no sure preventive-but it helps. The New York City Health Department has found that "in over 75% of the cases reported [in 1945] either immunization had not been performed or was inadequate. None of the persons who died of diphtheria had received adequate immunization against the disease...
This form of diphtheria is just as apt to attack adults as children. Even those who have been inoculated are not safe. The disease now flourishes in The Netherlands (4,000 new cases in one month) and Bohemia (1,700 cases in a month) and has made a start in Japan (over 3,000 cases in Tokyo this year). Inoculation is still the best way to fight it, but neither UNRRA nor the Army inoculates civilians. A few countries have managed to inoculate their schoolchildren, but grownups everywhere are taking their risky chances...