Word: pneumonia
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Died. Mrs. Alfred Emanuel Smith, 65, wife of the Empire State's brown-derbied ex-Governor and Democratic Presidential nominee (1928); of virus pneumonia; in Manhattan...
...sufferers (many of them dying), the good news came none too soon. Penicillin (sometimes rhymes with villain, sometimes with whistle in) is the best treatment for all staphylococcic infections, all hemolytic streptococcic infections, clostridia infections, pneumococcic infections (of the lining of skull, spinal cord, lung and heart surfaces), pneumococcic pneumonia that sulfa drugs will not cure, all gonococcic infections (including all gonorrhea that sulfa drugs will not cure). Diseases against which penicillin is effective but not fully tested: syphilis, actinomycosis, bacterial endocarditis...
...save lives so dramatically that the experts dropped everything else to test them out. In 1933, Dr. Fleming himself lent a hand with M & B 693, also known as sulfapyridine. The sulfas almost seemed to be the dream drugs he had looked for. They stopped deadly streptococci, even cured pneumonia. But the more sulfa drugs were used, the clearer it became that they 1) sometimes delayed healing by irritating wound walls, 2) did not work well in serum or pus. When used internally, they can cause severe, sometimes fatal, toxic reactions (TIME...
...penicillin will not entirely supplant sulfa drugs. The sulfa drugs are still necessary for: 1) intestinal infections (penicillin is destroyed in the digestive tract); 2) bacillus coll infections of the urinary tract (penicillin does not attack b. coli); 3) as prophylactics in epidemics of certain diseases like meningitis, pneumonia, gonorrhea (penicillin is excreted too fast to be used for this purpose...
Autopsy showed crystals in the young man's kidneys (commonest way a sulfa drug kills), damaged liver and heart, inflamed intestines, slight pneumonia.* Medical experts at the inquest laid most sulfa deaths to self-dosage. The drugs, they said, should be dispensed as carefully as strychnine or arsenic...