In the comic strips, measles is a joke. In much of the world the disease is treated lightly, partly from ignorance, partly because it is an almost certain incident of growing up. But measles is, in fact, all too often a killer or the cause of mental crippling. Last week Harvard's famed Virologist John F. Enders and 18 research colleagues, scattered from Colorado to Yugoslavia, reported dramatic progress in efforts to make a safe and sure vaccine against measles.
To date, 303 U.S. children have had the test vaccine; virtually all have responded by developing solid antibody protection against natural measles. Most have had a slight fever in the process, but none have become seriously ill. If wider-scale testing confirms these results, the vaccine may be licensed and generally available in about two years.
Threat to the Brain. The exact toll of measles illnesses and deaths is not known, the researchers note in the New England Journal of Medicine. In 1958 (most recent year for which full figures are available), 552 U.S. deaths were officially listed as caused by measles, as against 255 by poliomyelitis. Measles kills in many ways. The virus is sometimes the direct cause of fatal pneumonia, but more often it is the precursor of a bacterial infection. Measles also has a tendency to attack the middle ear, which may lead to permanent deafness (occasionally total) on both sides.
In its sharpest manifestation, the virus sets off an encephalitis (brain inflammation) so severe that it may cause death —or, worse, such sweeping damage that the victim survives only as an idiot or at the level of a vegetable. How many such cases there are is not known.
Though measles is a reportable disease throughout the U.S., fewer than a fourth of all cases are actually reported to health authorities. Women with several children usually call the doctor for the first one to come down with measles. They learn that he can do nothing to halt the disease, then they quietly apply his guidance in caring for the other children when they catch it—as they usually do, in quick succession. Since 95% of the population eventually gets measles, there are probably more than 3,000.000 U.S. cases a year. Up to 4,000 get encephalitis; best estimate is that 800 of these die (showing how woefully inadequate is the reporting of measles deaths); 2,000 survive with varying degrees of brain injury, and the rest pull through with no apparent permanent damage.
The Zinsser Influence. John Franklin Enders, 63, got interested in the viruses of polio and measles as the result of a series of fortunate fortuities. Son of a Hartford, Conn, banker who left $19 million, Enders had his B.A. ('19) from Yale and M.A. ('22) from Harvard, was well on the way to a Ph.D. and a teaching career in English when a friend exposed him to Harvard's late great Microbiologist Hans Zinsser, author of Rats, Lice and History. Enders switched to microbiology, took his Ph.D. in it ('30), settled down to teaching and research.