Medicine: The Cool, Cool Evening

When Jean T., 35, mother of two children, went to the doctor's office in Philadelphia, she had only a few little pimples and wheals on her face, arms and legs, but she complained that she had been driven almost crazy every night for eight weeks by unbearable itching. She could identify the places where the itching started by small black spots. A host of specialists in internal medicine and skin diseases had subjected her to examinations, plus blood-sugar, blood-count, urine and liver tests—not to mention a syphilis test. Unable to find any cause, they dismissed the patient as a neurotic, gave her tranquilizers, which did no good.

Drs. Milton M. Cahn and Fred R. Shechter admit, in the A.M.A. Journal, that they also might have failed to solve the mystery, but they happened to see something moving on the patient's skin. It proved to be an eight-legged critter, little more than one-fiftieth of an inch long, later identified as the northern fowl mite (Ornithonyssus sylviarum). The black dots Mrs. T. had noticed proved to be the mites' droppings. Evidently the mites caused the itching, and the fact that Mrs. T.'s husband, a clothing salesman, was not affected, though he slept in the same room, was probably a matter of individual sensitivity. But how did the mites get into the bedroom of a Philadelphia suburban home? The medical detectives tracked them to an unlikely source —the window air conditioner. The machine's intake, on the street side, was obstructed by two nests of the common starling. The mites had attached themselves to the starlings, but when the machine was switched on, they were vacuumed out of the plumage, into the bedroom and onto Jean T.'s sensitive skin.