Dysenteries

By dying of amebic dysentery which she had contracted in Chicago last year, Texas Guinan dramatically made the nation aware of an insidious epidemic which plagued the first summer of the Century of Progress (TIME. Nov. 20). Everyone who had been in Chicago, particularly everyone who had eaten in the Congress or Auditorium hotels there, worried for months about a tiny blob called Entamcba histolytica. Doctors would advise them to continue to worry. For, although as an aftermath of the Chicago dysentery outbreak, Soo were known to be infected and 50 to have died, Entameba histolytica may lie dormant for months or years. Cases, some of them traceable directly to Chicago, are sporadically coming to light. Last week amebic dysentery again made headlines, this time in Manhattan.

Pretty Virginia Loomis, 18, soft-voiced night club singer, was taken to Roosevelt Hospital, operated on for appendicitis. Eight days later she was dead of amebic dysentery. Broadway wailed its grief.

New York health authorities, however, were less interested in the case of Virginia Loomis than they were in a small epidemic of another kind of dysentery in New Jersey across the Hudson River.

A whiskery, rod-shaped germ called Bacillus dysenteriae and related to both the colon and typhoid fever germs causes bacillary dysentery. The bacillus strikes the bowels more quickly and feverishly than does the ameba. On the other hand, the bacillus does less damage than the ameba, and yields to treatment more readily. Nonetheless, seven have died of bacillary dysentery in New Jersey, 278 have been hospitalized since July. Some cases have appeared in Manhattan and surrounding New York communities, but no notable number of deaths.

Another outbreak of bacillary dysentery was reported last week from Northampton, Mass. There, "however, the epidemic is thoroughly localized among the 1,800 infirm and insane inmates of the Northampton State Hospital. Their dysentery score: 7 dead; 93 infected.

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