Word: isoniazids
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When the new TB drug, isoniazid, was first used (TIME, March 3), doctors noticed that some patients seemed to get a tremendous lift: they felt wonderful, out of all proportion to any real improvement in their lung condition. With some, this euphoria was so marked that it was a nuisance. But Dr. Albert E. Krieser saw no reason to expect the same sort of trouble when he began using Pyricidin (a brand of isoniazid) at Anoka State Hospital, Minn. His patients were both tuberculous and mental cases; most of them had shown nothing resembling a spiritual lift in years...
Nobody knows how isoniazid affects the central nervous system to produce the lift. But Dr. Krieser and his colleagues want to make sure that isoniazid is, as they now believe, better than shock treatment...
Questions. As Dr. Tompsett was careful to point out in London, bacilli can still be found in most patients with TB of the lungs after months of isoniazid treatment. So there is no reason to believe that the drug can really wipe out the disease. Nobody knows how long the drug can be given at a stretch, or how soon its effects may wear off after it is withdrawn...
Finally, there is the frightening fact that tubercle bacilli, by changing their nature, may learn to live with isoniazid, producing "resistant strains." But there is reason to believe that these can be kept to a minimum by giving isoniazid along with another anti-TB drug...
Near-final answers to most of these problems should be in by year's end. Meanwhile, the patient Navajo patients and the Bureau of Indian Affairs have helped Dr. Clark and the Cornell researchers to prove isoniazid's worth. It is the second truly great weapon for chemical warfare against...