TB Scare

Cora Louise Sutherland had always been a thin, wiry type, but in 1951 she developed a hacking cough and lost weight steadily. Each day she taught shorthand to three classes totaling more than 70 pupils at Los Angeles' Van Nuys High School. Students and fellow teachers whispered, but nobody knew what ailed her. For Cora Sutherland was a Christian Scientist. Instead of submitting a chest X ray every three years (as do all but about 100 of LosAngeles' 13,000 teachers), she turned in an affidavit declaring herself free of communicable disease.

Last fall Cora Sutherland became too sick to teach and took a leave of absence. Her Christian Science practitioner certified that she was suffering from a "lung congestion aggravated by activity." And when her salary stopped, he cut his fees for treatment (prayer and readings from the works of Mary Baker Eddy) from $62 to $25 a month. Last March Teacher Sutherland's brother finally insisted that she go to a hospital. The day after she was admitted, Cora Sutherland, 55, died of tuberculosis. The coroner's report showed that she had probably had TB in active form for fully two years.

Alarmed, the city's health department went out looking for 72 recent Van Nuys graduates who had been exposed to Cora Sutherland's tuberculosis, urged all to appear for chest X rays. Last week the health department asked the board of education to require all teachers to submit to complete medical examinations. Said the resolution: the teachers now sidestepping the examinations"may be exposing the school population of 463,719 to tuberculosis, a leading killer."

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