Snow-Mountain Sickness

In the rugged Schneeberg region straddling the border between Czechoslovakia and East Germany, the Russians have herded half a million human beings to dig uranium. Sanitary conditions are among the world's worst: open sewers and crowded barracks breed typhoid and dysentery, rats spread plague, and prostitution keeps the venereal disease-rate high. Last week, westbound fugitives from the mines told of an added horror which has turned many miners into choking wrecks: Schneeberger Krankheit (Snow-Mountain sickness).

In the Middle Ages, silver miners sickened and died of it. In the last century, cobalt and bismuth miners caught it. In the 1920s, the German government awarded compensation to the Schneeberg miners, and forbade them to work there more than two years in a row. Until the Reds took over, Schneeberger Krankheit affected only a score or so of miners a year. In the atomic age, the true nature of the illness has been revealed.

Schneeberger Krankheit is not one disease, but a combination of three: 1)silicosis, caused by inhaling finely powdered rock dust, 2) cancer, brought on by radiation from the pitchblende, and 3) tuberculosis, as a complication of the first two. At first, the victim feels short of breath.Then he gets acute pains in the chest and back, and begins to cough a lot. Later comes a racking, bloody cough, rapid loss of weight, and a grey, cadaverous look about the face. The victim is doomed, though he may suffer on for months or years.

The current outbreak is so severe that Communist authorities are worried about a drop in output. They have ordered miners to wet down the pit walls, to lay the dust, and to wear long rubber boots. But it is impossible to suppress the dust entirely, and the Russians are not copying the German plan of rotating the miners after two years. Before that is likely to happen, many a Schneeberg slave worker will be dead.

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