Library Collections: Document: Full Text

It was an already known scientific fact that monkeys can readily be fatally infected with infantile paralysis simply by pouring the virus of this plague into their noses. Indeed, aside from injecting it directly into their brains, simple instillation of virus into their nostrils is the most certain way of giving monkeys the disease. Might there not be found, then, some simple, safe, chemical which, uniting with those hairlike endings of the nerves of smell, would block those nerves, shut them off from the attack of the infantile paralysis virus?

Pursuing the same line of reasoning and following the same trail preceding Schultz, and entirely independently of Schultz, Drs. Charles Armstrong and W. T. Harrison, of the Public Health Service, at this time published the fundamental fact that the nerves of smell of monkeys could actually be blockaded against the attack of infantile paralysis virus for a number of days. This could be accomplished by douching the noses of monkeys with solutions of alum or tannic acid. But these chemicals had a practical disadvantage, so far as their possible application of guarding children went, in that they were irritating, and in that their protective effect was a short one. Nevertheless, the principle was established that such a simple chemical prevention was possible, and credit for this must go to Drs. Armstrong and Harrison.

Now, at the same time, in the Winter of 1935-36, Armstrong in Washington and Schultz at Stanford -- one not aware of the work of the other -- discovered a far more powerful and at the same time less irritating chemical: picric acid. Three to six douches of picric acid were found to guard, for at least six days, nine out of ten monkeys from overwhelming inoculations of the infantile paralysis virus into their noses.

Here for the first time in history was a means by which experimental animals could be guarded by a preventive that was really powerful and not too dangerous to preclude its being tried as a preventive of epidemic infantile paralysis in children.

At this point the efforts of Drs. Armstrong and Harrison of the Public Health Service, and of Schultz working for the Commission, diverged. Armstrong further strengthened the preventive effect of his picric acid solution against monkey infantile paralysis by mixing with it a little alum. He then went into the field with this picric-alum preventive, to test its effect in the human epidemic that broke out in Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee in the summer of 1936. Schultz confined his efforts to the laboratory: first, to determine the important practical point of how long this preventive effect of picric acid might last; and second, to try to find chemicals that might be still more powerful, even less irritating, and whose effectiveness might extend over months, instead of days.

During the autumn and winter of 1936, these researches of Schultz met with much success. Weak solutions of the very cheap and harmless chemical, zinc, sulphate, instilled, or better yet, simply sprayed into monkeys' noses, were discovered to confer almost 100 per cent protection of monkeys against overwhelming inoculations of otherwise fatal infantile paralysis virus, repeatedly poured into these animals' nostrils. Most important of all, this protection by harmless zinc sulphate turned out to be not a matter of a few days, evanescent, but of one to two months, at least.

It is thanks to Dr. Charles Armstrong, that certain important facts regarding the obstacles to, and the possibilities of, human application of this chemical blockade are already at hand. In the Southern epidemic of 1936, millions of doses of Armstrong's picric-alum preventive were sprayed into the nostrils of Southern citizens, young and old. The basic conclusions from this strange mass experiment by the masses themselves upon the masses are these:

(1) The procedure was essentially harmless. There were a large number of complaints of a minor nature, of headache, irritation, largely by older persons. There was no fatal or serious accident. (2) The mass of parents can be depended upon eagerly to welcome the introduction of any preventive offered them by competent and recognized medical and public health authority. (3) The mass itself, i. e., fathers and mothers, cannot be depended upon properly to apply the nasal spray, so that the endings of the nerves of smell of all children and grown-ups will be surely covered by the protective chemical. (4) In spite of the enormous variation in the skill and completeness with which the spraying was done by the largely uninstructed myriads, there is yet some evidence that, where the spray was applied sufficiently early in the epidemic, there resulted an apparent decrease of cases occurring.

Meanwhile the work continues, with a chance that some more simple, satisfactory method of completely covering the nerves of smell may be found. Is the zinc sulphate solution the last word in possible chemical preventives? By no means. And search for other ones is being diligently pursued.