Parrots in Pittsburgh

On the brilliant plumage of Pittsburgh's parrots, parrakeets, cockatoos and macaws last week fell the shadow of Death. Ordinarily Pittsburghers are as fond of such birds as anyone else, and the U. S. Public Health Service assured them that wholesale destruction was unnecessary. But weeks of rumor had shaken the city's nerves. By last week when three deaths had been officially attributed to psittacosis (parrot fever) and the suspicion of it laid on eight other deaths and some 50 illnesses, Pittsburgh was badly scared. By mid-week 180 birds had croaked their last. The symptoms of psittacosis--chills, fever, weakness--approximate those of pneumonia. Unless he knows that his patient has been around a sick parrot, the average U. S. doctor will probably diagnose pneumonia. Dank, smoky Pittsburgh is the nation's worst pneumonia city, the only one where pneumonia patients are quarantined. Its pneumonia fatality rate (43%) is the nation's highest. So 207 pneumonia deaths from Feb. 1 to March 16 were not alarming. The only extraordinary thing was that so many of them were among employes of McCreery's big department store. Back from shopping one day in early March, the wife of Pittsburgh's Dr. Isaac Hope Alexander told him that seven McCreery employes had died of pneumonia within a fortnight, that 15 or 20 others were ill. She also told him that there were some very pretty parrots on McCreery's fourth and fifth floors. Next day Dr. Alexander was called to attend the supervisor of McCreery's pet shop, also ill of pneumonia. Dr. Alexander, who remembered the psittacosis epidemic which hit Pittsburgh and other U. S. cities in 1929-30, put two and two together, reported his suspicions to Health Director Raymond P. Moyer. Two days later an autopsy on the pet shop supervisor confirmed his suspicions. At McCreery's, health inspectors found several sick birds. Director Moyer had a macaw chloroformed, shipped off to the U. S. Public Health Service in Washington for examination. Alarmed, McCreery's quietly executed 85 birds, cleared out its fourth and fifth floors, fumigated the whole store. Meantime Pittsburgh seethed with rumors of a psittacosis epidemic at McCreery's. Alert newspapermen itched to print the story, but as yet they had no official confirmation. The first warning which Pittsburgh doctors got was a notice, inspired by Dr. Alexander, in their Medical Bulletin of March 10. Two days later Director Moyer issued a guarded public statement, making no mention of McCreery's or of an epidemic. On March 15 came announcement of the first death officially attributed to psittacosis, that of a McCreery employe. Same day the U. S. Public Health Service dispatched a specialist to Pittsburgh, reported that the McCreery macaw had had psittacosis.

A colorless, reticent onetime drug clerk, Dr. Moyer was snatched from an undistinguished career as a clinical pathologist to guard Pittsburgh's health. Around him last week swirled the same charges of suppression which were piled on Chicago's Health President Bundesen after he made his long-delayed announcement of the amebic dysentery epidemic last autumn. It seemed evident that Pittsburgh's Health Department had suspected something wrong since mid-January, when McCreery's and another pet shop received dead and dying birds in shipments from California. The Department quarantined all the birds for ten days, then allowed them to be put on sale, even though it has been demonstrated that a parrot may carry the disease for 14 months. Also in January the Department sent two of the dead birds to a Public Health Service laboratory. The Service found them too badly decomposed for diagnosis.

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