Medicine: Capital Cleanup

Gonorrhea flourishes in cities. It flourishes particularly in Washington, D.C.; only three* U.S. cities have more. Since 1941 the number of reported cases in Washington has jumped nearly 600%.

Last week the District of Columbia Health Department went on the air to do something about it, broadcast over radio station WTTOP an interview recorded in a venereal disease clinic. A woman's voice quavered a bit as she answered the intimate questions. Had she ever thought about gonorrhea? "No, I had not thought about the disease very much, only in the way that one thinks about leprosy." It turned out that the patient, an unidentified office worker, did have gonorrhea.

The Health Department was also handing out 500,000 pamphlets, written by U.S. Public Health Service experts. They were designed for distribution in bars, barbershops, drugstores, rooming houses and hotels; each has an appropriate cover, a list of gonorrhea symptoms, and the cheerful news that one injection of penicillin cures nine out of ten cases.