Word: chloramphenicol
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Chloromycetin. which is Parke. Davis' trade name for the potent antibiotic chloramphenicol. got FDA approval in 1949. It attacked many bacteria against which penicillin was useless, notably the typhoid bacillus; equally important, it was the first effective drug against psittacosis (caused by an unusually large virus) and against such diseases as typhus, scrub typhus and spotted fever (caused by related microbes called rickettsiae ). Not until 1952, when hundreds of thousands of patients had had the drug-often for viral respiratory infections against which neither it nor any other antibiotic is effective-did evidence arise that it had caused...
...seven wards they put an outright ban on all the most cherished antibiotics (penicillin, streptomycin, three tetracyclines, chloramphenicol, erythromycin and novobiocin) unless the doctors could show that one of these drugs was unquestionably the best for the patient's disease. Then they had to give their first-choice antibiotic in combination with a second, to cut down the microbes' chance to develop resistance. Penicillin, as the drug previously most abused, was put under special restrictions: on some wards it could not be given at all, and when used, it had to be injected on a side ward...
What to Do? Most of the dangerous staph are immediately found to be resistant to penicillin and streptomycin. They show descending orders of resistance to the tetracyclines (Aureomycin, Terramycin, Achromycin) and chloramphenicol (Chloromycetin). Strains have emerged that show varying resistance to still newer antibiotics. Strangely, nobody knows exactly how severe the problem is because most deaths caused by staph are not so listed. If a patient admitted for heart surgery dies of a staph infection, his death is attributed to the original heart trouble. Example: in Seattle and surrounding King County, only four deaths...
...farmer's germs were a special strain. They had licked their weight in penicillin, and come back to knock out streptomycin, chloramphenicol and aureomycin. Unchecked, they were a sure bet to kill the farmer. Dr. Garfield G. Duncan pitted the tough germs in a test tube against neomycin. The drug murdered them...