Word: penicillins
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...running a fever. X rays revealed a shadow, indicating what doctors call "infiltrates" in the lungs. One possible cause was a pulmonary embolism (a traveling blood clot). But the doctors at Groote Schuur Hospital concluded that the likeliest cause was pneumonia, and they attacked vigorously with heroic doses of penicillin...
...Billion Cells. If pneumococci were indeed involved, the penicillin should have killed them. But Washkansky did not get better. Instead, his white-blood-cell count plummeted alarmingly. As is usual after major surgery, it had been high-about three times the normal. Now it fell within a few hours to a low normal. In an effort to keep the count from dropping fatally close to zero, the hematologists centrifuged eight pints of fresh blood to separate the white cells and infused an estimated 25 billion of them into an arm vein. Even then Washkansky's white count...
Then came a disturbing report. One afternoon Washkansky complained of chest pains and started running a slight fever. By morning he was coughing up sputum. Doctors diagnosed it as pneumonia, in the next 24 hours gave him 20 million units of penicillin...
...against 20,000 for syphilis. The U.S. Public Health Service believes that the true figures, withheld because of embarrassment or ignorance, are closer to 1,200,000 and 300,000. The problem is not the cure; though some strains of both the syphilis and gonorrhea germs are resistant to penicillin, there is still no venereal disease that cannot be cured in its early stages by antibiotics. The trouble lies in finding VD victims, finding the person who infected them, and finding the contacts to whom they have passed on the disease. To this end, doctors and nurses have been pressed...
...group reasoned that since it seems to be the nucleic acid in the virus' core that provokes natural interferon output, something like a harmless form of nucleic acid might stimulate the increased production they were seeking. They tested helenine, extracted from a mold related to those that make penicillin and already known to have antiviral properties (though no one then knew why). Extraordinarily complex extraction procedures yielded a pure ribonucleic acid (RNA). But this was no ordinary RNA, such as occurs in the cores of many viruses in molecules of single strands. This proved to be a double-stranded...