Word: penicillins
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...Tokyo pediatrician named Tomisaku Kawasaki, now 55, was struck by something unusual. Several of his patients at the Japan Red Cross medical center had the symptoms of scarlet fever, yet did not respond to penicillin. In the next years Kawasaki spotted similar cases. By 1967 he was convinced that he was seeing a new illness, one that mostly struck children under five, and could only be diagnosed by a combination of distinct symptoms. Among them: high fever persisting for five or more days, congested blood vessels in the eye, skin rashes, enlarged lymph nodes in the neck, peeling...
...whites . . ." The interrelation of men and menus has filled hundreds of texts. But none of them have digested so many facts so well. Wittily, the authors explain why Muslims eschew pork (pigs would have been an ecological disaster in the Middle East) and why chicken soup -so-called Jewish penicillin-really does help to cure a cold (it comforts nasal passages). They show why Chinese drink no milk, discuss the Aztec hunger for human flesh (people who ate people were the victims of protein deficiency) and explain why Africa's Bemba society would collapse into chaos without beer...
Another apparent last-ditch expedient in Tito's remarkable survival has been the use of an experimental U.S. drug called Moxalactam, produced by Eli Lilly & Co. of Indianapolis. The penicillin-related drug has not yet been licensed for sale in the U.S. But when Tito's doctors requested an emergency shipment late last month, permission was almost immediately granted by both the State Department and the Food and Drug Administration. Initial results were encouraging. Nevertheless, high fever has persisted and medical experts doubt that the new drug can maintain his life...
...implications were staggering. Here at last, it seemed, was an agent that would mow down a broad spectrum of viruses, just as penicillin does with bacteria. Most laymen remained unaware of the discovery, but one notable exception was Dan Barry, artist of the Flash Gordon comic strip. That became evident when the first clinical use of interferon took place not in a hospital but in a 1960 Flash Gordon adventure. In that episode, spacemen infected with an extraterrestrial virus aboard a rocket ship far from home are pulled back from death's door by last-minute injections of interferon...
Whatever questions remain about both the role and effectiveness of interferon as a cancer drug, most could be answered if larger amounts of IF were available. Admits Gutterman: "We don't really know what we're doing yet. It happens with every new drug. In its early days penicillin was good at treating minor infections but not the big ones, like endocarditis [a bacterial infection of the heart valves]. It took years to figure out that it would work there too?but only at very high doses. But everyone said at first it would be crazy to try that level...