Ardmore Disease

Among the airmen stationed at Ardmore Air Force Base in southern Oklahoma, an increasing number no longer walked with brisk military step or the traditional wild-blue-yonder look. First by ones and twos, then at the rate of ten a day, they shuffled with short, gingerly steps to the base hospital. Heads sunk to their chests, their breathing fast and shallow, they complained that it hurt if they breathed deeply. Any jarring motion, even from a few brisk steps, was painful. Some kept their arms folded to serve as a sort of splint for the chest.

Baffling Symptoms. The medics found that the airmen, far from goldbricking, had a baffling variety of symptoms. All had high temperatures--half of them went over 100DEG. Nearly all had tender, enlarged lymph nodes, tenderness in the abdomen, and pharyngitis. A few were first treated as outpatients, but soon had to be admitted to the hospital. There, with no treatment but bed rest and a highprotein, high-carbohydrate diet, they unaccountably got worse. Their livers, which had been enlarged in most cases on admission, became bigger, and so tender that the airmen resisted the medics' efforts to examine them. Half of them also had enlarged and sensitive spleens.

With 63 cases piling up, the Ardmore hospital was crowded, and the overflow was sent to Sheppard A.F.B. in Texas. At both hospitals and at laboratories across the country, tests were made on all kinds of specimens submitted by the doctors. All were bafflingly negative. After an average of a month in the hospital, most of the airmen were rated well enough to return to quarters. But before the last were out, many of the first cases were back in the hospital. The second time round, their aches and pains and liver enlargement were worse. Many were kept in the hospital as long as six months. Then, rated still unfit for duty, several were sent out of the service on medical discharges.

Elusive Critter. What was it? Reporting the 1955 outbreak in detail in the A.M.A.'s current Archives of Internal Medicine, Drs. William L. Wilson, Charles D. Williams, Saul L. Sanders and Richard R.P. Warner (now back in civilian practice) rule out various diseases that exhibit some but not all of the same symptoms--notably infectious mononucleosis and infectious hepatitis. (Also eliminated is a bacterial disease, leptospirosis.) Though similarly baffling, the mysterious complaint is medically distinct from the strange epidemics of "Iceland disease" that have swept some London hospitals and Punta Gorda, Fla. (TIME, May 20).

The researchers are convinced from the way the disease spread to doctors, nurses and corpsmen that it is caused by a virus. But they could never catch the critter. And though its effects partly resemble those of some of the Coxsackie viruses, it does not respond to any of the tests for that group. The best the doctors can do is to call it "Ardmore disease," and hope that some clues will turn up.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.