50,000,000 Hopeless Cases

Almost half of Latin America's 120,000,000 inhabitants are sick with diseases that are not incurable, but from most of which they will never recover. Smallpox has wiped out entire villages; tuberculosis, malaria, typhoid are always rampant. Hundreds of thousands suffer from exotic and mysterious home-grown ailments. Some, like ainhum or "barefoot leprosy," are lingeringly fatal.

To stimulate U.S. medical research in Latin America, Journalist Charles Morrow Wilson has published an account of its diseases, called Ambassadors in White (Henry Holt; $3.50). The book contains biographies of U.S. yellow-fever "ambassadors" (Gorgas, Reed, Finlay, Noguchi) and strange tales of native doctors. Its descriptions of unfamiliar tropical diseases may be startling to U.S. readers. Some of them:

Pinta, a tropical skin disease, caused by fungi which settle in the epidermis, permanently blotch the skin with patches of greyish violet or red. When the sickness runs its course, dark men are streaked dead white, fair men dull blue, sometimes tinged with green. (Mr. Wilson first saw green and blue men on a Colombia farm after a "night out".) Neither painful nor fatal, pinta is serious because it disfigures, is very infectious. It can be checked with antiseptic drugs, especially chrysarobin, powder obtained from a tropical tree, which is an ancient remedy of Indian herb doctors. But only tattooing can restore the blotches to their original color.

Oroya fever of the highland Andes, apparently caused by nocturnal, blood sucking flies (phlebotomi). The first phase of the disease is a raging fever, highly in fectious, usually fatal; the second, an eruption of pea-like warts on knees, elbows, face. For this menace there is no known prevention, no known cure.

Trypanosomiasis, or Chagas' disease, caused by a parasite spread by ticks, bed bugs, pig flies. Commonest in Brazil, Venezuela, Peru, Argentina, the trypanosomes invade the lymph nodes, thyroid, heart muscles, bone marrow, etc., cause fever, heart disease, sometimes insanity. There is no effective cure.

Filariasis, another parasite disease, affecting as much as 98% of the population in the highland slopes of Guatemala. The filariae, which are carried by coffee flies, sometimes produce bright green nodules as large as walnuts on the scalp; these fibrous nodes must be dug out by surgery. Another type of filaria, mosquito-borne, is widely prevalent in the West Indies, causes elephantiasis, grotesque swelling of the arms, legs, buttocks, sexual organs. No effective ways have yet been found of treating this ailment.

Yaws, afflicting about a third of all Haitians, long confused with syphilis because of their loathesome, gaping sores. Spread mainly by flies, also by ticks, lice and bedbugs, yaws affect mostly Negroes, "is a consequence of abject poverty." It can be cured by salvarsan, but the process is costly, painful, interminable.

Sprue, a wasting sickness (cause unknown) that chiefly attacks white people in towns & cities. It produces constipation, melancholy, low blood pressure, muscle cramps, diminution in the size of the liver. Constantly increasing in the temperate zones of Latin America, sprue seems to be related to vitamin deficiency, can be checked by an increase of fruits and vegetables in the diet.

Infectious jaundice, or Well's disease, presumably transmitted through the infected urine of men or rats. This painful malady is not uncommon in the U.S., although seldom diagnosed correctly. Also prevalent is rat-bite fever, an excruciating disease marked by successive waves of sores which resemble those of syphilis.

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