The New Plagues of Summer

In Exodus, Aaron smote the waters of Egypt with his rod and the waters turned to blood. Across the U.S. in steamy midsummer, it seemed that at least a few of Pharaoh's plagues were descending--a reminder, if not of biblical wrath, then of nature's perplexing force.

The Gulf Coast of Florida from St. Petersburg to the Marco Island area was visited by a "red tide," a massive bloom of microorganisms (Gymnodinium brevis). They stained the sea water rusty brown and killed thousands of fish, which then washed up on the beaches to rot. Workers cleaning the beaches around St. Petersburg could hardly keep up with the harvest of dead fish putrefying in the summer sun. It was the worst occurrence since an eleven-month siege in 1946-47 destroyed an estimated 100 million pounds of fish.

Venezuelan equine encephalomyelitis. a mosquito-borne virus that originated in South America, swept up into Texas, and parts of Oklahoma, Louisiana and Arkansas, killing at least 1,500 horses, burros and mules and afflicting hundreds of humans with severe, flu-like symptoms. Ranchers call the disease "blind staggers," describing the head-down, stumbling gait of a stricken animal. A plague of gypsy moths defoliated numerous forests in the East (TIME, July 26). For the second consecutive year, the Southern corn-leaf blight was rotting crops in all of the Midwest's corn-producing states.

The blight (Helminthosporium maydis), though not yet so severe as last year's attack, has now spread on its wind-borne spores to 31 states. Flourishing in warm, wet weather, the pathogen reduces the size of kernels, weakens the stalks and rots the ears. Because farmers have enough feed grain to last for nearly a year, however, the blight probably will not noticeably affect the price of such foods as meat, milk, cheese and poultry.

Shiga Deaths. There were other disorders of a sufficiently deadly potential to trouble U.S. scientists. Shigellosis, a bacillary dysentery that is a virulent and highly infectious intestinal disease, is epidemic in Central America, where it has attacked more than a thousand people in Guatemala alone. Some epidemiologists fear that it may be moving northward into the U.S. Three deaths, probably from "Shiga," have occurred among Indians in Arizona; the most recent victim was an elderly woman who died of it in Florida after a visit to Nicaragua. Shiga responds to antibiotics and chemotherapy--when those treatments are available.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is watching for any outbreak of African swine fever, a disease deadlier than anthrax or hog cholera. Swine fever is said to be epidemic in Cuba and it is possible that an imported Cuban ham could carry the disease to Mexico, thence to the U.S. No known vaccine exists to combat it.

Taken together, these disorders are no doubt mild in comparison with polio, typhus and smallpox, which once ravaged entire communities. They are very nearly innocent in contrast to the more familiar and lethal cancer, heart disease, V.D. and automobile and other accidents. Perhaps it is not the destructiveness of the recent blights and diseases but their exoticism that arouses a chill of sheer human vulnerability.

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