Pinta

Some hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans are blotched with a skin disease called pinta. Heretofore U.S. doctors have assumed that the continental U.S. was mysteriously pinta-proof. But in a recent issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, Dr. Eugene Paul Lie berthal gave the first U.S. pinta report -- three cases in Chicago. He believes that in the South there are many more pintados, whose disease has been wrongly diagnosed.

Pinta does not hurt, does not make patients ill in the early stages, but: 1) it produces unsightly blotches; 2) patients usually have positive Wassermann and Kahn tests (their doctors are likely to tell them that they have a venereal disease); 3) anti-syphilis drugs help early pinta, but once the white spots develop, nothing restores the skin to normal; 4) the disease goes on & on (one of Dr. Lieberthal's patients has had it for twelve years).

Dermatologists used to think pinta was a fungus disease, but in 1938, Mexican doctors proved that the germ is a spirochete that looks exactly like those of syphilis or yaws (a tropical disease characterized by sores on the skin). In 1939, Mexico's Dr. Francisco Leon y Blanco published the results of experiments on himself and 31 Mexican and Cuban volunteers, all of whom had been inoculated with material from pinta patients. Dr. Leon y Blanco gave the first play-by-play description of the disease's course. First a small, dark raised spot appears on a leg or arm (there may be several of these and they last for months without breaking the skin). Then a cluster of similar spots, which grow larger, form blotches some times as big or bigger than a 50-c- piece. On white people the blotches are pink, red or brown; on dark-skinned people they are purple, blue or black. Some blotches itch. After a year or more the dark spots begin to lose their color, and the patient's skin becomes a chiaroscuro of bleached blotches and normal pigmentation. Among Dr. Leon y Blanco's volunteers were three men with syphilis. They all got pinta, proving that the two diseases are not the same.

Dr. Lieberthal's Chicago patients (two Negroes and one mixed Negro, French and Indian) were born in Canada or the U.S., knew no one from the tropics, knew no one with pinta. Dr. Lieberthal does not know where they picked it up.

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