Medicine: Polio's Little Brother

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As a disease detective in New York's Westchester County, Dr. Gilbert Dalldorf was called in on many a late-summer and early-fall epidemic of what seemed to be mild polio. Few victims suffered paralysis, and all recovered, often with startling rapidity. In a 1942 outbreak in White Plains, Dr. Dalldorf saw what he calls "the footprints of other viruses," but it took him five years to track down the particles. From patients with similar illnesses in the Hudson River town of Coxsackie (pop. 2,800), Dr. Dalldorf isolated a hitherto unknown virus. The Coxsackie virus thus put the town* indelibly on the microbiological map.

Last week Iowa-born Gilbert Dalldorf, 59, won one of the 1959 Albert Lasker Awards ($2,500 plus a gold Winged Victory statuette) for following the White Plains footprints to Coxsackie and beyond, and also for showing that one viral infection may interfere with the development of another. (This may explain why, though Coxsackie and polio often coincide, one usually predominates and few if any patients seem to get both diseases.)

Meanwhile, Dr. Dalldorf explained at the awards luncheon in Manhattan, the Coxsackie criminal has been shown to be an international syndicate of about 30 viruses in two groups. Some cause Iceland's pleurodynia, or "devil's grip," and Bornholm disease (named for the Danish island in the Baltic where it was first reported). Others cause a rapidly fatal inflammation of the heart muscle in the newborn. One sets off a severe sore throat unaptly named herpangina. Several behave like polio's little brothers. And, said Dr. Dalldorf, now with Sloan-Kettering Institute after a stint with the National Foundation, many reported cases of paralytic polio after Salk vaccinations are probably not polio at all, but Coxsackie.

Other Lasker winners in public health and medical research:

¶ Maurice Pate, 65, executive director of UNICEF, for round-the-world fighting of disease and malnutrition in children.

¶ Dr. John Holmes Dingle, 50, of Western Reserve University, for research in respiratory diseases caused by viruses, and working to develop vaccines against them.

¶ Dr. Albert Coons, 47, of Harvard University, for making antibodies fluorescent under the microscope.

¶ Dr. Jules Freund, 69, of the National Institutes of Health, for adding oils to vaccines, making them far more potent.

For the first time, two special ($5,000) Lasker awards went to members of Congress for championing increased appropriations for medical research: Alabama's Senator Lister Hill and Rhode Island's Congressman John E. Fogarty.