Crusader Without a Cause

No man has fought harder against .TB than Florida's William T. Edwards, lay chairman of the state tuberculosis board. A businessman and onetime professional lobbyist for the late Albert I. Du Pont, Edwards spent much of the past 30 years lobbying for anti-TB measures. He wheedled some $30 million out of the legislature for four TB hospitals, plus millions more for other attacks on the disease. But last week Crusader Edwards, now 73, was accused by Florida's leading TB specialists of deliberately wrecking the program he had so laboriously set up. Their argument: Edwards cannot grasp just how successful his own crusade and the doctors' new drugs have been.

The dispute centers on Edwards' stubborn fight against Florida's "early-release" policy, which has cut the average TB patient's hospital stay from two years to around nine months by using such drugs as isoniazid and para-amino salicylic acid (bought with money Edwards wrung from the legislature). Edwards contends that the drug-treated patients will suffer relapses. When he heard talk this spring that the new policy might eventually allow the William T. Edwards Tuberculosis Hospital in Tallahassee (400 beds) to be converted into a mental hospital, he argued that if Florida disbands its TB facilities, it will be unable to handle the flood of restricken patients he is sure will turn up sooner or later.

So far, instead of emptying the 1,800 beds in Florida's four TB hospitals, the early-release program has kept them from 86% to 96% full by bringing in newly detected cases for quick drug treatment. (Florida reflects the national trend. From 1954 to 1956 the nation's TB beds, excluding those of the Veterans Administration, declined by only 8%, from 90,344 to 83,213.)

Florida doctors scoffed at Edwards' fear that the drugs might eventually lose their effectiveness. Says Dr. Eugene Flipse, director of the chest unit at Miami's Jackson Memorial Hospital: "Our relapse rate now is about nine-tenths of i%, which is a fraction of what it used to be when about one out of every three released patients came back." Adds Dr. Roberts Davies, the state TB board's medical director: "I don't know of any informed [medical] opinion that we should keep patients longer than we do."

An old Edwards ally, State Senator Fletcher Morgan, started an investigation that, he hinted, might last for the next two years, until the legislature reconvenes. "That means a two-year period to further harass and sabotage the program," says Dr. Flipse. At week's end Governor

LeRoy Collins said he would try to settle the duel. Meanwhile, Edwards was hurt by all the fuss over his campaign. "I have been mistreated and misunderstood," said the old crusader.

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