Measles Year?

Last year statisticians announced that in this country next winter and spring some 800,000 people, chiefly children, will catch measles (TIME, Nov. 22). Last week that calculation seemed conservative, for 1938 has started out with all the signs of being a measles year. Pennsylvania, Ohio and Illinois last week suffered epidemics of measles. And in the U. S. at large there were four times as many cases as at the same time last year. Extraordinary as this is (for 1934 and 1935 were measles years, and usually measles strikes heavily only twice in a decade), doctors who read their medical journals diligently were better prepared than ever before to combat a respiratory disease which causes much misery and some deaths.

For one thing, they can detect an incipient case of measles by applying a blue black stain called nigrosin, which has a special affinity for measles virus, to a specimen of mucus from the nose or throat of anyone suffering from a sore throat. If he is coming down with measles, the virus can be seen under the microscope as dark dots.

And if a patient has measles the doctor may be able to shorten its course or make it less severe by injecting: 1) blood serum from someone recently recovered from measles, or 2) an extract of human placenta.

To make it easy for Chicagoans to get such serums the late Samuel Deutsch, Chicago steelman, established a Serum Center at Michael Reese Hospital, which now stocks serums against infantile paralysis and scarlet fever as well as measles. But in all the U. S. there are only six similar serum centres--Manhattan, Los Angeles, Des Moines, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Detroit.

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