Recruits' Meningitis

Even as the 25,000 soldiers in the mammoth maze of barracks at California's Fort Ord were being trained for action against an enemy that might be as distant as Viet Nam, they were already engaged in mortal combat with an insidious and invisible invader right in their midst. Spinal meningitis has struck down 59 trainees this year and killed nine of them.

In an all-out effort to halt the epidemic, 3,000 of the soldiers are under drastic quarantine. These are the men who have been on Fort Ord's 29,000 acres of hills and wind-blown sand dunes for less than eight weeks. For reasons that still have medical researchers baffled, only the rawest recruits seem subject to the disease. After a man has spent two months on the post, he apparently develops immunity, and cases among the permanent party are virtually unknown.

How Does It Spread? Fort Ord, on the Monterey peninsula, reported the first cases of its current meningitis epidemic in January. Colonel Ro'land Sigafoos, the base medical officer, was not taken by surprise. There are epidemics every few years in big camps; the Navy had had one only last year at San Diego (TIME, March 22, 1963). Sometimes, daily doses of sulfadiazine are a good preventive, but the meningococcus germs storming Fort Ord were of a type resistant to sulfas.

More cases appeared in scattered barracks. As usual, the medics could not trace the paths by which infection spread. Thousands of recruits had meningococci in their throats, but did not get sick. There was no way to predict which few men would develop a life-threatening infection that would race through the bloodstream and attack their meninges--the covering of the brain and spinal cord.

Worst of all, there was no way to halt the fatal process in the rare fulminating or explosive cases in which a man who seemed to have nothing more than a headache in midafternoon was dead by nightfall. Last week Private Michael Sandstrom, 19, from Sylmar, Calif., died within two hours of admission to the post hospital.

Small Compensations. After this ninth fatal case. Major General Edwin H. J. Cams tightened the quarantine still more. The men had been confined to the camp for a month. Now the new recruits are confined to their own company areas, even for Sunday services, in units of only 240 men. They are banned from post exchanges, movies, the beer hall. The usually rugged physical training has been softened to cut down fatigue. And a man who complains of the slightest sniffle or headache can be sure he will be rushed to the dispensary. There are none of the usual top kick's sneers about goldbricking; the command and the medics are taking no chances.

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