An Aqua-Velva Man ... '
A tank ship loads crude oil at a Venezuelan jungle port. At night, it is attacked by swarms of moths. The crew breaks out in a mysterious rash -- except for one man, who has the unusual .habit of bathing daily in after-have lotion.
Holmes -- or in this case, Dr. Ben Smith of the University of Texas Medical Branch dermatology department -- had his work cut out for him.
Smith is an avid Sherlock Holmes aficionado, a card-carrying Baker Street Irregular (the international Sherlock Holmes society). Itches and rashes are his Moriarty, and tracking down their sources requires much the same insight and deduction Holmes used in solving that arch-villain's misdeeds.
This particular case was interesting, Smith recalled, noting that at different times the rash that felled the crew of the ill-fated tanker Alvenus was thought to be scabies, or even a moth-borne mite.
The only thing that every one was sure of was that the seamen started itching as the Alvenus loaded crude oil at the Venezuelan port of Caripito, a small jungle outpost on a river several miles inland.
At night, Smith said, the ship's lights attracted swarms of moths.
"They came on by the thousands," he said, so many, in fact, that their bodies piled four to five inches deep on the decks and had to be shoveled off.
The crewmembers who drew that duty were the first ones to start itching. Soon -- within 24 to 48 hours -- the entire crew had been stricken with a rash.
After the ship left Caripito, the moths died, but the itching continued.
Especially badly affected were the engine room crew -- who stand under ventilators to cool off -- and those whose watches placed them near the ship's gyrocompass, which is cooled by an air blower.
When the Alvenus' hull ruptured off Lake Charles, La., stranding the crew at sea until the ship could be towed to Galveston, several crewmembers were flown into Lake Charles to see doctors.
Those doctors, Smith said, thought the crew had scabies, a rash borne by microscopic mites. Soon, he said, laughing, "it got twisted around to where they thought it was mites from the moths" causing the problem.
The crewmembers were treated with Kwell, an anti-mite medication, and given steroids to alleviate the rash. But the itching continued.
Another crewman was then .flown to Houston's Baylor College of Medicine, where, Smith said, dermatology department chairman John Wolf, an old friend, was perplexed. "He called me," Smith said, "and said he had never heard of moth mites, arid neither had I."
Smith thought that it was probably not mites, since in a mite outbreak, not everyone is affected. He ventured that it sounded more like a reaction to some irritant present throughout the entire ship.
"Indeed," Smith said, "the guy that had been off the ship stopped itching," as did the entire crew, once they were put up in a Galveston hotel.
Smith then-remembered a "practically identical" case of a ship's crew all coming down with the same symptoms in Port Everglades, Fla. in 1967.
He looked through his medical journals, and sure enough, there in a 1969 American Medical Association Journal was the case.
Smith told Wolf what he had found, and Wolf referred the ship's by-now frantic lawyer to him. "He told me he had all these people who had itched," Smith recalled.
Smith asked him if he knew the Alvenus' last port of call, which he did not. "l said, 'it was probably Caripito.' He checked, and it was."
The AMA publication, Smith said, explained that a certain species of moth common in the Caripito area has hairs on its body that are coated with an irritating toxin. These hairs come off the moth very easily and get caught on clothing, in curtains, and in other tight places, and when people then brush against them, they become embedded in the skin and cause the "Caripito Itch."
In fact, when some crewmembers returned to the ship at Todd Shipyards in Galveston to remove all the curtains and linens for laundering, they broke out again, on their arms.
Smith said natives of the area are all too familiar with the problem, and will not turn on lights at night, to avoid attracting the insects.
In the Alvenus' case, he said, the hairs from the thousands of moths.that swarmed over the ship were sucked into its ventilation system -- which is why the crewmembers stationed near blowers were affected the worst.
Smith said there was never any question among the crew that the moths had caused their problems.
'They said the ship was 'attacked' " by the moths. But "the poor guys were all scared they had something contagious."
One man -- the ship's cook -- was not affected by the itch. Smith said.
This man "bathed down with Aqua-Velva every day," he recalled, laughing.
Somehow this rather unorthodox habit enabled him to come through the episode without a scratch ... so to speak.
