Word: penicillins
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...units show newsreels and Walt Disney films on how to stay healthy by not drinking dirty water. Britain has a couple of Kurdish-speaking consuls who are running themselves ragged. The U.S. prints a small weekly magazine in Kurdish which few people read. Its question & answer section ("Who invented penicillin?", "What is television?") draws about 30 letters a week...
Doctors have found that antibiotics are great germ killers. Why different antibiotics kill different groups of germs they do not know. But, just as a hopeful pool player with no clear shot will try a combination, so will they. If penicillin alone will not work in a particular case, they may try penicillin and aureomycin together. But haphazard combinations of antibiotics may delay, instead of hasten, the patient's cure...
Researchers at the University of California have found that there are about as many cases of antagonism between the drugs as there are of cooperation. By & large, they report, any two of four antibiotics in Group I-penicillin, streptomycin, bacitracin and neomycin-work well together. Except in rare cases, however, none of these four should be used with an antibiotic from Group II: aureomycin, Chloromycetin, terramycin. And while no great harm may come of combining two antibiotics within Group II, no real advantage can be expected either; the combination simply works like a bigger dose of either drug alone...
Antibiotics. After the sulfas came the antibiotics. No drug was ever launched with more drama than the first and greatest of these-penicillin. As the story is usually told in the drug trade, Merck & Co. missed out on penicillin in the early stages because it concentrated too hard on trying to find a way to synthesize it and got left behind. George Merck explains it differently: "The Government asked us to put up a plant, but insisted that Merck apply for Government money to finance it. I said 'No, that would make it look as if we were lobbying...
Other companies did, and got into penicillin faster. But Merck got a head start with the next antibiotic, streptomycin. When Rutgers' Dr. Selman Waksman found that his beloved soil bacteria had made something that killed many germs which penicillin did not affect, he took the culture to Rahway. Though half a dozen companies are making streptomycin today, the best guess is that Merck microbes, in their own temple of vats at Elkton, Va., make 40% of the U.S. output...