Word: penicillins
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...daily bath prevents the disease. Three to six injections of arsenical drugs clear it up. Penicillin cures it permanently, apparently without danger of reinfection. But for lack of soap, water and penicillin, 80% of the people of Haiti are afflicted with the foul, rotting disease known as yaws. That was the grim news last week from a U.S. Sanitary Mission which has been manfully fighting yaws in Haiti for nearly three years-with little success...
...penicillin test on 500 patients, the mission got lasting cures in every case.† But at $5 a shot (minimum treatment: two shots), penicillin is beyond the means of Haiti's treasury or the mission's appropriation. Last week, outside the mission's clinics, stinking, pitiful yaws victims still lined up each morning by the thousands. Some of them crawled miserably on their haunches, because their legs had been eaten away. Some had no faces left, only teeth protruding from lipless, roofless jaws...
...molecules containing radioactive sulphur could be traced with Geiger counters. If they had wandered off by themselves, they would have proved that they are different chemically from natural penicillin. But they followed it faithfully through all the processes, proving that the composition was identical...
Next step: to separate synthetic penicillin in pure crystalline form. The most successful separation method used two liquids which do not mix. Since one dissolved penicillin more readily than the other, penicillin concentrated in it, leaving unwanted substances behind. The process had to be repeated again & again, but finally the biochemists got their pinch of brown crystals: the first pure man-made penicillin...
Cheaper & Better? Dr. du Vigneaud does not claim that this process can compete economically at present with the vats of slimy blue-green mold which produce natural penicillin. But he points out that synthetic methods usually become more efficient with practice and as they are better understood. Eventually, synthetic penicillin may be cheap enough to treat the poorest patient...