Red Cholera

After a 14-hour day wielding the hypodermic on hundreds of terrified Chinese in Hong Kong's refugee-packed city of Victoria, the exhausted British doctor could no longer keep a stiff upper lip. "Damn them!" he exploded. "They had this thing raging in there, and they tried to keep it a secret. It's inhuman." By "they" he meant Communist authorities of Red China, who had a cholera epidemic for months in Kwangtung province, around Canton, and had tried to keep news of it from slipping through the cracks in the Bamboo Curtain. They could not keep the tiny microbe of cholera, Vibrio comma, from slipping through with refugees escaping to Hong Kong or to the nearby Portuguese islet colony of Macao.

Last week Hong Kong health officials had confirmed 60 cases, with six deaths, in the colony's islands and mainland territory. Within ten days, the doctors vaccinated 1,750,000 (out of a population of 3,000,000). Cholera vaccine was arriving daily by jet from the U.S., Britain, India (the birthplace and permanent home of cholera), Borneo and Australia. Among the U.S. shipments was a Government gift of 450,000 shots.

Cholera is spread by any means that gets Vibrio comma from the feces of one victim to the digestive tract of the next--chiefly contaminated water and food. To keep the disease out of other parts of Asia, shipment of fresh fruits and vegetables into or out of Hong Kong was banned. In the Philippines and Formosa, less than two-hour flights away, raw food from Hong Kong was seized and burned. The Philippines, which have a heavy, regular and effective program of cholera vaccination, began giving booster shots but reported no cases. Formosa hurriedly got out its needles at ten health stations, and a U.S. Navy medical laboratory there stepped up production and shipments of vaccine. Throughout the Far East, travelers from Hong Kong had to show a recent inoculation certificate (immunity lasts only about six months) or face enforced quarantine.

The Chinese Reds had been boasting that since they took over the mainland in 1949, there had been no cases of cholera. Campaigns against filth helped to suppress it, but sanitation has recently been neglected. Last week, still making no admission of cholera, Radio Canton reported an all-out campaign against "seasonal diseases."

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