Word: penicillin
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...wonder drug penicillin (TIME, Feb. 8) is doing even better than expected. In the Lancet, Britain's H. W. Florey, who first sponsored the drug, recently described the largest series to date of penicillin-treated (and usually cured) cases. The patients had osteomyelitis, septicemia, eye infections, meningitis, chronic infected wounds. Findings...
Under National Research Council supervision, several doctors are now making small-scale penicillin trials, but their work is a military secret. No secret is the drug's use on Cocoanut Grove fire casualties (TIME, Dec. 7) at Massachusetts General Hospital. Each patient got sulfadiazine to prevent streptococcus infection on burned surfaces and then, if he still had a temperature six days later, intramuscular injections of 5,000 units of penicillin every four hours to prevent staphylococcus infection. It is notable that no patient so treated died of staphylococcus blood poisoning...
...Seems Likely. . . ." Among the first to experiment with penicillin in the U.S. were Drs. Dorothy H. Heilman and Wallace Edgar Herrell of the Mayo Clinic. Judging from their work and that of others, penicillin should be highly useful against an impressive array of bacteria: Staphylococcus aureus and Streptococcus pyogenes (pus formers), Diplococcus pneumoniae (usual germ of lobar pneumonia, often present in cerebrospinal meningitis and septicemia), gonorrhea germs, Neisseria intracellularis (cerebrospinal meningitis), Streptococcus viridans (heart infection), Actinomyces bovis (lumpy jaw of cattle...
...Penicillin has the disadvantages of being hard to make, easy to spoil-it must be kept at refrigerator temperatures and would be very inconvenient for battlefield use. But, since it may fill many gaps in chemotherapy, the doctors following it feel like hounds on a hot scent...
...Gramicidin, a drug extracted from soil bacteria and easily confused with penicillin, is also recommended as a wound dressing but is extremely dangerous if it gets into the blood stream...