Conversion To Epidemiological Disease Control Ship
When the Navy relinquished its administrative duties to the U.S. Department of the Interior, Whidbey's role changed; her operations took on a different complexion in light of the Korean War that had broken out in the summer of 1950.
Whidbey, the value of her past service as a mini-hospital ship proved by experience in the Trust Territories, was overhauled at Yokosuka and converted from a medical survey vessel to a Fleet epidemiological disease control ship, becoming, in effect, a modern floating laboratory, with equipment and trained technicians capable of analyzing the most minute organism.
Deployed to Yokosuka, Japan, a port through which United States Marines were being rotated back to the United States from the combat zones in Korea, Whidbey's embarked Fleet Epidemiological Disease Control Unit No. 2 processed the homeward-bound marines for dysentery, malaria, or any other parasites contracted at the front. After the ship's medical team had obtained the samples, the marines sailed for the United States.
Working almost 24-hour shifts to obtain the results in minimum time, Whidbey's technicians then dispatched a report of results to the port of embarkation for each individual processed. As each transport arrived at her destination, quarantine officials there would thus be ready to treat whatever parasitical disease any marine had brought back from Korea. That process enabled those who had contracted malaria or any dormant infections to be cured before they returned to stateside posts or civilian life.
Read more about this topic: USS Whidbey (AG-141)
Famous quotes containing the words conversion, disease, control and/or ship:
“The conversion of a savage to Christianity is the conversion of Christianity to savagery.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“The fantasies inspired by TB in the last century, by cancer now, are responses to a disease thought to be intractable and capricious—that is, a disease not understood—in an era in which medicine’s central premise is that all diseases can be cured.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“There is one thing you and I as parents cannot do, not do we want to do if we really think about it, and that’s control our children’s will—that spirit that lets them be themselves apart from you and me. They are not ours to possess, control, manipulate, or even to make mind.”
—Barbara Coloroso (20th century)
“You mustn’t be afraid of death. When this ship sailed, death sailed on her.”
—Charles Larkworthy. Denison Clift. Anton Lorenzen (Bela Lugosi)