Pneumonitis

A new disease is sweeping the U.S. It is known as "pneumonitis," "virus pneumonia" and a half-dozen other names. The Army, which has special reason to be worried, labels the disease "primary atypical pneumonia, etiology [cause] unknown."

Luckily it is rarely fatal, but after a week or so of acute distress a patient is usually left shaky and washed out for several weeks. The disease chiefly attacks adolescents and young adults, often in groups such as schools, colleges, Army posts. Peak of the pneumonitis season seems to be in the late fall and winter, whereas most other respiratory diseases reach their peaks in February and March.

Unlike flu or a cold, pneumonitis entails inflammation of the lungs; hence it can often be distinguished only by X-ray photographs. And unlike pneumonia, no bacterial cause can be found. In fact, nothing at all is known about its cause (some doctors think it may be not one but a group of related diseases). Probable cause is a virus, but researchers haven't identified it. Since doctors don't know the cause of pneumonitis, they know little about its treatment.

"Frankly we are scared." As one competent Army doctor puts it: "Pneumonitis is a virus disease, we believe, and frankly we are scared to death of any virus disease because we never know when its virulence will flare up and make it a real killer. We are scared of pneumonitis not because of what it has done but because we don't know .what it can do, or what we can do to stop it."

Strangely, a person who has been weakened by pneumonitis is not peculiarly susceptible to pneumonia bacteria or influenza viruses. The disease is mildly contagious; but prolonged rather than casual exposure seems required to bring it out. An epidemic this month at the University of Rochester medical school sent 40 nurses, students, doctors, to bed.

General symptoms are fever (usually 100DEG-103DEG), cough, chilliness, headache (often severe). Lung inflammation appears within the first few days but is seldom as extensive as in pneumonia. Sulfa drugs don't help the patient and sometimes increase a patient's misery. Treatment with pneumonia serums has also proved futile.

Where has the disease been all these years? First vague hints of its existence go back to 1872, and some doctors suspect it was prevalent though unidentified before the great flu epidemic of 1918. But pneumonitis first emerged in its present form as an epidemic in Honolulu in 1934.

Mysterious emergence out of nowhere is common to viruses. In size they are somewhere between living bacteria and lifeless molecules, and they share some characteristics of each. They crystallize like lifeless matter, but they also possess the astonishing ability to reproduce themselves like living organisms. A virus "generation" probably lasts for only 20 to 30 minutes, so that an eon of virus evolution can occur within a few years on the human time scale. New and fiercer breeds of virus can thus develop from time to time, then vanish. Doctors believe that the virus which caused the worldwide influenza plague of 1918 is still with us, but the once deadly old stock is relatively decadent.

Similarly, pneumonitis may be caused by a new type of virus which never before existed. It may become more virulent, or peter out.

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