The Waterbury Democrat., 1938-01-26
BY PAUL DE KRUIF Written for NEA Service

The search for truth is as full of adventure as any other kind of hunting.
 Dr. E. w. Schultz, of Stanford University, was one of the first to prove the hopelessness of vaccineS or serumS to save monkeys from infantile paralysis. His truth hunt had covinced him that infantile paralysis is uniquely sickness of nervous tissues. Hidden away inside of nerve cells growing inside those cells, the deadly disease virus is safe from any virus-killing power that vaccineS might give to blood.
 This was bad news for our en- dangered children.
 Yet at the same time this culri- ous habit of the virus to live in, and to destroy only nerve tissue might be at the same time the weakness of this paralyzing sick ness, and Shultz was one of the first to see that.
 Infantile paralysis death cannot invade the spinal cord of child by way of it's blood. If the death had to sneak in by way of nerve tissues, then it had only one pos sible gateway into the body. That was by way of the delicate, hair like endings of the nerves of smell, high up inside the nose. These are the only nerves that lie naked to the outside world. SEEKING KEY TO LOCK
 DOOR TO NERVES
 It was firmly established truth that monkeys can easily be fla tally infected with infantile pa ralysis simply by pouring the vii rus Of this plague into their nos trils. Mightn't there, then, be some simple way to shut this door to paralytic death?
 While Schultz was experiment. ing in California, a gleam of new truth arose in the Rockefeller h. stitute in New York. Drs. Olitsky, Sabia and Cox were trying to protect mice from the virus of a brain disease of horses. They could give mice this sickness by dropping the horse virus into the noses of these mice, and now here was curious news
 The mice couldn't be given the horse brain sickness if you first washed out their noses with a lit- tie tannin.
 WORK ON OTHER
 MALADIES HELPS
 And now at the laboratory of the U. s. Public Health Ser vice in Washington, D. C., Charles Armstrong discovered that he could guard mice from the terri bly, fatal St. Louis sleeping sick ness - simply by washing out their noses, before he inoculated them, with weak solution of alum |. The trail of the hunt for an infantile paralysis preven- tive was getting hot. Armstrong bagged his game: simply washing out the noses of his monkeys with this alum, protected seven out of every ten of them from fatal in- fantile paralysis, when, a few days after, its virus was dripped into their noses. Now here was a preventive still more powerful: weak alum mixed with weak pie ric acid guarded monkeys-for at least a week-protected nine out of ten monkeys from infantile pa ralySis death.
 Quickly from the laboratory of Schultz in California came con- firmation of the power of picric acid to prevent the infantile pa ralysis of monkeys, when this chemical was douched or sprayed into monkeys noses. And the truth was vouched for, too, by Olitsky and his comrades in the Rockefeller Institute, and by Searcher Aycock at Harvard.
 Here was the greatest advance in the fight against infantile pa ralysiS since the original diScov- cry that the sickness could be given to monkeys.
 FIELD TESTS
 ARE PROMISING
 Now, in he face of the 1886 infantile paralysis epidemic that ragged in Alabama, Tennessee, and Mississippi, Charles Arm strong went into the field to test the power of his picric-alum nose spray to guard southern children. Millions of doses were sprayed into the nostrils of young and old. Here are the truths that Armstrong found from his study: The nose spray was essential, harmless. There were a large number of complaints, but they were of a minor nature-of head 1 ache. nose irritation. in a few