Fraternity-Testvériség, 1963 (40. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)

1963-09-01 / 9. szám

F RATERNITY

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OFFICIAL ORGAN OF THE HUNGARIAN REFORMED FEDERATION OF AMERICA Edited by the Officers of the Federation

Published monthly. — Subscription for non-members in the U. S. A. and Canada $2.00, elsewhere $3.00 a year.

Office of Publication: Expert Printing Co., 4627 Irvine St., Pittsburgh 7, Pa.

Editorial Office:

Suite 1201, Dupont Circle Bldg., 1346 Connecticut Ave., Washington 6, D. C. Volume XLI SEPTEMBER 1963 Number 9

CORNERING A CHILD KILLER

There is a calmness to the scene despite the tragedy it portrays. The doctor merely presses a little girl’s hand against a chemically

treated jelly and watches as the substance turns from red to milky

yellow.

Now the doctor knows why the child has been suffering from severe lung infections. He knows why she has trouble breathing. He understands why she is always hungry but cannot gain weight.

She is afflicted with cystic fibrosis, a complex, little-understood

disease that is usually fatal.

Somewhere else, another child sleeps under a plastic tent while a

nebulizer fills the air with mist that will help to keep him alive a little while longer — perhaps long enough for someone to find a way to cure him.

And in a medical laboratory, a doctor examines and analyzes a thick murky liquid that may hold the key to the mystery of cystic

fibrosis.

The fight to knock out this puzzling illness is only now beginning to gain momentum. Although about one child of every 1500 is born

with it — some 3000 of them a year in the U. S. alone — doctors didn’t even know that cystic fibrosis existed until 1936. Before that time, they mistook its symptoms for those of other diseases.

Doctors at the Cystic Fibrosis Research Institute in Philadelphia,

the leading organization dedicated to finding a cure for the affliction,

point out that almost every development in the fight against CF has accurred in the past 15 years.

Even the discovery that unusually large amounts of salt in a CF victim’s perspiration can provide an accurate means of diagnosis wasn’t

made until 1949. The hand print test is based of this extra salt.

What is CF? Experts at the Institute describe it as an hereditary illness which attacks certain glands, filling the respiratory system with an unnaturally thick mucus which prevents proper breathing and leads

to lung infection.

Abnormal mucus also obstructs the pancreas, making it impossible