INFANTILE PARALYSIS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 12 May 1943, Page 4

INFANTILE PARALYSIS

MICE AS GERM CARRIERS, EXPERIMENTS IN AMERICA. “The house mouse, most common of all rodents, was credited today with being the chief carrier of infantile paralysis. Dr William D. Holla, Westchester County commissioner of health, reported that the experiments of two of his colleagues pointed strongly in that direction.” This Associated Press message was dispatched throughout the United States on February 10. “If true, the discovery,” the message continued, “is one of the most important since Dr Wallace Reed gave his life to demonstrate his theory that mosquitoes carried malaria. However, one of the nation's leading authorities on poliomyelitis discounted the announcement and declared he believed the conclusion unfounded. “Dr Holla said the current experiments grew out of five cases of infantile paralysis, two of them fatal, which occurred last September in a half-mile square area in White Plains. He directed his investigators to look for dead animals or insects in the vicinity. The searchers found a dead mouse on a coal pile in the home of one of the victims and dead mice near the homes of the others stricken. “As a result Dr Gilbert Dalldorf, director of laboratories at Grasslands,

the Westchester County Hospital, started a series of tests and persuaded Dr Claus W. Jungeblut, of the department of bacteriology at Columbia University, to do the same. Their findings, Dr Holla said, are outlined in the February issue of the American Journal of Public Health. “Solutions from the brains and spinal cords of the dead mice were injected into the systems of 12 generations of healthy albino mice, causing paralysis, and, in most cases, death.”