KLEVEN BLUE MEN

From the New Yorker these annals of medical detection have the fascination of their assiduous inquiry into strange symptoms and uncommon manifestations and the drama- in which disease is often the killer- begins with some enigmatic circumstances. A mortality in a city hospital is traced to some raw pork; three victims of typhoid fever alert the vigilance of the New York Public Health Bureau (from whom most of this material derives) to a source of infection which resulted from a game of wild Indians and a stopped up drain pipe; an outbreak of rickettsialpox, the newest of known diseases, ends with the identification of a mite by an enthusiastic exterminator; eleven elderly men turn blue and a cafeteria where sodium nitrate has been used for salt provides the common contact; a man from Mexico revives an old scare, smallpox, and leprosy is once again ""a lonely road"" for one of its victims; a needle provides a lasting surcease from care for one of its users- a heroin addict -- when tetanus results. These and others provide a dossier of afflictions and infections which arouse doubt and dread but are traced to their source with precision, patience and enterprise, none of which is lost in the transmission here.