Word: keefer
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...custodian of the nation's meager supply of streptomycin was on the hot seat. To Boston's Dr. Chester S. Keefer* it seemed that everyone wanted the powerful new drug-foreign nations; Congressmen (for their constituents); distraught fathers & mothers, anxious to try anything that might cure a sick child. Newspapers were featuring swallow-hard stories about babies wasting away for want of streptomycin...
Writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Dr. Keefer brought doctors up to date on the drug. Said he: "The primary interest. . . is to determine its effectiveness and toxicity in certain infections which are not susceptible to treatment with sulfonamides, penicillin and other therapeutic agents. . . . Much remains to be learned...
Concluded Dr. Keefer: "Because of the restricted supply ... it is obvious that patients selected to receive [streptomycin] must be those whom it can be expected to benefit and from whose treatment useful, needed information can be derived. Under present conditions many requests will inevitably have to be refused...
...Miracle. Last year penicillin patients were still rare enough to be frontpage news. First such case was two-year-old Patricia Malone (see cut) of Jackson Heights, Queens. The New York Journal-American, which begged enough penicillin from Dr. Keefer to save her life from staphylococcic septicemia, last week won the Pulitzer Prize for the story. After that, the whole nation watched one "hopeless" case after another get well...
...unenviable job of deciding who should and who should not get penicillin was Dr. Chester S. Keefer, of Boston's Evans Hospital. He is chairman of the National Research Council's committee on chemical therapy, to which WPB turned over the rationing of the drug. Because it is especially effective in treating battle-wound infections, most of the meager supply (amount: a military secret) goes to the armed forces...