OCR Text |
Show FROM SNAIL FEVER TO MALARIA Plan African 'Disease Safari' Armed with microscopes instead of 16-inch guns, naval medical scientists scien-tists are preparing for a new so-' of African safari on which they will study some of the diseases native to the dark continent. The navy medical group, will accompany ac-company the African expedition being be-ing sponsored by University of California, Cali-fornia, hence will have the duty of providing medical service to the university paleontologists and anthropologists an-thropologists who will cover most of Africa this year seeking traces of primitive man and apes. For their own purposes the navy doctors will study such native diseases dis-eases as African sleeping sickness, bilharzia or snail fever, plague, scrub typhus, yellow fever and malaria. They also will scrutinize a number of parasites which inhabit human beings, for instance the particular par-ticular form of hookworm in Mozambique, Mo-zambique, Portuguese East Africa. To pursue their studies the group will have to trap and shout animals which are the disease carriers. Among these are the rodent-carriers of bubonic plague, the zebra, deer, gazelle, elan and possibly lion?, tigers and leopards which are believed be-lieved to be reservoirs of African sleeping sickness. Most of these animals have not been used in research by American medical scientists before because animals which are potential disease carriers are not allowed to be imported. im-ported. If they should escape captivity captiv-ity they might introduce an entirely new series of diseases into the United States., There are particular regulations, for example, against the fruit bat, a known carrier of malaria, which, if once established here, would destroy de-stroy citrus fruits. The fruit bat, however, is highly regarded by medical scientists as a good laboratory animal because it is easily raised in captivity. It Is possible that certain phases of the malaria cycle now entirely understood under-stood could be worked out through study of it. |