Word: penicillins
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...week 300 specialists in fungus infections, convened in Manhattan under auspices of the New York Academy of Sciences, agreed that 1959 had marked a turning point in the history of man and his itches: a new antibiotic, griseofulvin (extracted from a Penicillium species closely related to the source of penicillin), is the best remedy so far discovered for fungus infections that obligingly concentrate on the body's outer surfaces...
Almost as fast as new antibiotics are marketed, there evolve a few strains of disease-causing microbes that are resistant to the most potent germ killers. Recently, thanks largely to overuse and outright abuse of favorite antibiotics-especially penicillin-it has seemed that medical scientists were fighting a losing battle (TIME, March 24, 1958 et seq.). Now British researchers report that the microbes' advance can be checked by rigorously restricting the use of common antibiotics, and imposing the strictest discipline on doctors and nurses...
...most U.S. outbreaks of in-hospital infection) were resistant strains of the common Staphylococcus aureus, usually found in boils and infected wounds. Scene of the counterattack was London's huge Hammersmith Hospital. By late 1957 no less than 88% of Staph aureus cultures there were resistant to penicillin, 82% to tetra-cyclihe, and 70% were immune to attack by a combination of the two drugs. Then Dr. Mary Barber, 48, a topflight bedside bacteriologist, and her anti-staph team went into action...
...seven wards they put an outright ban on all the most cherished antibiotics (penicillin, streptomycin, three tetracyclines, chloramphenicol, erythromycin and novobiocin) unless the doctors could show that one of these drugs was unquestionably the best for the patient's disease. Then they had to give their first-choice antibiotic in combination with a second, to cut down the microbes' chance to develop resistance. Penicillin, as the drug previously most abused, was put under special restrictions: on some wards it could not be given at all, and when used, it had to be injected on a side ward...
...wailed to her mother. "I don't want any breakfast." All day, Barbara rested on the living-room sofa. That night, when her temperature rose to 102, her parents took Barbara to a doctor, who looked at the child's inflamed throat, gave her a shot of penicillin. It was no help. Next day, Mrs. Lorraine Mathis returned from market in Forked River, N.J., and found Barbara unconscious, in convulsions, her temperature raging above 110°. Last week, in an ambulance bound for a Manhattan hospital, Barbara Mathis died...