Editors: Paul A. Harper, M.D..
I WAS among 5 from the Seattle-King County Department of Public Health and 1 from the Medical School who left for Iran early in 1951 and 1952 and, as the Seattle Times reported after my return "Halfway Around the World from Puget Sound, a handful of `Shirt-Sleeve Diplomats' from Seattle have been fighting communists for the past 2 years by killing mosquitoes.
"The first phases of their program have worked so well that in one Iranian city the undertaker complained that he had too little business and demanded a salary from the public treasury. He got it too!"
The Director of the Foreign Operations Administration's Mission in Iran, Mr. William E. Warne, in an interview with the New York Times last spring credited the public health program in Iran as the greatest single factor in keeping Iran on this side of the Iron Curtain.
The Seattle group were among 37 American public health specialists, most of them commissioned as officers in the U.S. Public Health Service, employed in the Point IV program, now a part of the Foreign Operations Administration, in Iran, a country almost as large as all of the United States east of the Mississippi River.
The World Health Organization was in Iran too. When we arrived, WHO had a malaria control advisory unit of 3 technicians:
Submitted on December 3, 1954