The Search for Security

Among the many living things that make men ill, the most baffling are the tiniest-the viruses. Drugs seldom do any good. The best defense is the immunity that comes after a mild attack; hence one of the big drives in medicine is the search for mild attackers, i.e., vaccines.

In Toronto last week, a gathering of pediatricians heard from an expert a quiet, restrained, but potentially epochal progress report on vaccine research. The speaker was Dr. Joseph Stokes Jr.. chief physician of the Children's Hospital in Philadelphia, who has been working on a vaccine for measles. Though smallpox, rabies and yellow fever have yielded to vaccines, a dozen or so virus diseases remain to be conquered. Dr. Stokes and his fellow workers may be on the way to victory over most of them, including polio.

Dr. Stokes takes account of two kinds of immunity. The first is the "passive" kind-e.g., the immunities that every baby receives from its mother, and that last for only the first few months of life. Doctors now know that this kind of immunity can often be given later in life by injections of the blood fraction known as gamma globulin, taken from persons who have had some of the virus diseases. Like the newborn's immunity, this soon wears off. But if somebody enjoying this temporary immunity is exposed to the virus, Stokes reasons, his body goes to work and develops the second, or "active," kind of immunity, which, in many diseases, may last indefinitely.

If Dr. Stokes's theory is right, it goes far to explain why poliomyelitis has been a serious problem in Southern California, with its high living standards and good sanitation, and rare amid the poverty and open sewers of Mexico's Lower California. Most U.S. babies, while enjoying their brief afterbirth immunities, are so carefully guarded against infection that they have no chance to develop active immunities of their own. Whereas Mexican babies in Lower California presumably are exposed to polio, and develop lifelong "active" immunities.

Dr. Stokes is planning experiments to see whether a throat spray containing a virus of a disease such as mumps, given soon after injections of gamma globulin, can produce active immunity against the disease.

Dr. Stokes offers no promise that man can gain immunity against the commonest virus-;that of the common cold.

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