Bus Ride to Manhattan

A Mexican importer named Eugene LeBar and his wife, bound for Manhattan, boarded a bus in Mexico City. That was on Feb. 25. Four days later, checking in wearily at a midtown Manhattan hotel, Mr. LeBar began to feel ill. His wife tried to nurse him, finally had him taken to a hospital.

On March 10 he died of "hemorrhagic bronchitis"--or so the doctors thought.

By last week, Eugene LeBar's month-old death had touched off one of the most elaborate disease hunts in recent U.S. history. Throughout Manhattan, and all along the bus route, in many another U.S. city and town, health officers and U.S. Public Health Service officials anxiously tried to reach all the thousands of people who might have come in contact with LeBar on his fortnight's wanderings. He had died of smallpox.

Nobody was sure what had really ailed Mr. LeBar until two fellow hospital patients--a Negro baby and a 25-year-old man--came down with smallpox within two weeks after his death (usual incubation period: 14-21 days). Laboratory tests confirmed the suspicion. Soon four other cases developed. One patient died. These were Manhattan's first smallpox deaths in 35 years, the first cases in eight years.* And it was a particularly virulent form of the smallpox virus.

The Hunt. Against smallpox, one of the most contagious of all diseases, there is only one effective protection--vaccination. New York Health Commissioner Israel Weinstein promptly warned New Yorkers who had not been vaccinated within five years to get vaccinated. He also set to work to protect all the city's employees, rounded up for vaccination firemen, subway workers, social workers, policemen, hospital staff members, 1,000 guests in the city's flophouse. Some 2,500 patients who had been discharged from a city hospital during LeBar's stay there were called back for vaccination. Thousands of New Yorkers queued up at vaccination centers. At week's end, Mayor William O'Dwyer decided to "pour in every available piece of machinery and manpower to insure that every person in the city is vaccinated." He summoned the city's 175,000 wartime air-raid wardens to ring doorbells, set up free vaccination centers in police stations, health centers, hospitals.

Meanwhile, Public Health Service investigators got to work on the sizable problem of tracking down other possible LeBar contacts. Items:

P: The hundreds of his fellow guests at the big Manhattan hotel, now scattered to their respective homes throughout the nation.

P: His fellow bus passengers, also widely scattered, with no record of their addresses.

P: The gas stations, restaurants and roadside stops along the route where LeBar had debarked to eat or stretch his legs.

When P.H.S. "detectives" finally found Mrs. LeBar (she had flown on to Maine, and fortunately had been vaccinated), she had only a hazy notion of the bus's route, remembered that it had stopped at Laredo, Dallas, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh. Checking bus routes, the investigators figured that LeBar probably also stopped off at San Antonio, Tulsa, Joplin, Indianapolis.

*Most recent previous U.S. outbreak: in Seattle a year ago (68 cases, 20 deaths).

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