Infectious Diseases: New War Against TB

Medical science knows how to prevent tuberculosis, and it can cure most cases of the disease. But TB is still far from beaten. Surgeon General Luther L. Terry of the Public Health Service has just announced that in 1962 there was an actual increase, to almost 55,000, in the number of new cases of active TB reported in the U.S. The major problem remains the necessity for early diagnosis of hidden infection; treatment must be started early to keep the disease from becoming disabling, and to keep patients from unknowingly infecting others around them.

Last week the New Jersey coastal community of Toms River (pop. 7,000) opened what the state's Health Commissioner Roscoe P. Kandle called "a new front in an old war." It did so with a new weapon: a more efficient and more economical test for TB infection than any previously available. Developed by New York's Lederle Laboratories, the "tine test" uses no awesome and sometimes painful needle but a disposable gadget with four tiny prongs in its business end. The tines are coated with protein from dead TB bacilli. If the punctured area becomes inflamed within two or three days, it shows that there has been TB infection. X rays are then taken to show whether the disease is active.

House-to-House. With the backing of state and local TB fighters, Toms River physicians and civic workers organized a campaign to get everyone in the community tine-tested. Not that Toms River has more TB than most other U.S. communities—it probably has less, thanks to uncrowded living conditions and abundant sea breezes—but the makeup of its population is a good cross section of the nation. And it has plenty of what Dr. Kandle calls the "win-it-now spirit," determination to wipe out old-fashioned TB completely before a new super strain of drug-defying bacilli can emerge.

With Drs. Willis B. Mitchell and Walter E. Corrigan as cochairmen, the campaign committee signed up 14 registered nurses, organized Boy Scouts, Candy-Stripers and Blue Belles (high school hospital volunteers) to help them by toting gear and logging names. Because any mass health project is most efficient when the subjects are brought together and can be run through a line, the Toms River tine testers worked the public schools first; they also jabbed the forearms of cadets at Admiral Farragut Academy. But the testers had to do a house-to-house job too.

Red-Spot Check. The expected complications arose. One of Mrs. Felix Cittadino's five children had just gone to the hospital for a tonsillectomy, and she had forgotten the test date. But when the nurse rang her doorbell, she hauled a baby out of the bath, called another youngster home from a neighbor's. She asked: "Do you shoot something in or take something out?"