Medicine: Sack's Shacks

• Share

Last week Philadelphians had poked under their proud noses the unwholesome fact that within 15 miles of City Hall was a suburban slum of almost medieval squalor. Its name was Sackville and it consisted of 60 rickety shacks squatting around a woolen mill. Sackville was settled 135 years ago and has stood still ever since. Its streets are unpaved. It has no running water, no sewers, no electricity. Almost every wage-earner among its 300 residents works in the mill. Last week the cry of "Anthrax!" prompted Rudolph H. Sack, owner of mill and town, to advise a general evacuation of Sackville.

Anthrax is a disease of sheep and cattle which humans who work with hides or wool may get through skin abrasions. It produces pustular swellings which may become gangrenous. A rarer form of the disease is pulmonary, from inhaling dried spores in dusty workrooms. Three months ago a young Sackville mill employe died of anthrax. Since then four other Sackvillians have been stricken. All recovered.

Owner Sack had the ground around the mill cleansed with burning gasoline, equipped his workers with masks and gloves. But he did not decide to evacuate the town until the parents of a child who had lost an eye from anthrax threatened to sue him. Last week he bluntly explained that workers are covered by industrial insurance, but that his company could not pay compensation for illness or death of nonworkers & children.

While a few families were preparing to move out, Pennsylvania's Health, Housing and Labor Departments moved in on Sackville. The Health Department told residents they need not move, since anthrax is infectious but not contagious and hence there was no danger of an epidemic. The Housing Department launched an investigation with a view to cleaning up the hovels provided for Sack workers. The Labor Department gave Owner Sack 30 days to install sanitary lunch, dressing and toilet facilities, make his mill a decent place to work in.