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Stephanie Hegarty on 06 Feb 13a devastating measles epidemic broke out "coincident with," to use Neel's phrasing, his arrival in the field in 1968. Neel indicated he had brought two thousand doses of measles vaccine and had planned to hand these over to mis- sionaries in the region. But faced with the epidemic, Neel and his team vaccinated many Yanomami as well. Here is how Neel described his actions: "Much of our carefully designed protocol for that expedition was quickly scrapped as we dashed from village to village, organizing the missionaries, ourselves doing our share of immunizations but also treatment when we reached villages to which measles had preceded us. We always carried a gross, almost ridiculous excess of antibi- otics - now we needed everything we had, and radioed for more" (1994:162). To what degree this description accurately reflects Neel's actions during the epidemic is one of the critical questions in the controversy. Tierney accused Neel of wors- ening the measles epidemic through his actions; others have suggested Neel could have done more than he did to save Yanomami lives during the epidemic.