Word: sulfa
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Streptomycin, an antibiotic containing a germ-killing soil organism called Actinomyces griseus, is especially effective against certain deadly "gram-negative" infections for which there was no known cure. It does the job in many a case where penicillin and the sulfa drugs fail. But it is expensive: about $16 a gram (average treatment: six to ten grams). Since the drug's discovery in 1944 by Rutgers' Microbiologist Selman A. Waksman, it has been tested against a wide variety of diseases by a National Research Council committee headed by Boston's Dr. Chester S. Keefer. Their report...
Just when the sulfa drugs, penicillin and the other antibiotics seemed to be sweeping most of the bacterial diseases before them, a dark thunderhead of rumor appeared on the horizon-the germs were rallying and fighting back. All over the U.S., bacteriologists studied the phenomenon, and by last week the rumors were well confirmed. Within a few years, ventured Dr. Hans Molitor, penicillin and streptomycin may lose much of their power to cure some of the most prevalent diseases. No alarmist, Dr. Molitor should know what he is talking about: as director of the Merck Institute, he was a pioneer...
...Arctic and the cactus to the desert, the bacteria seem to adapt themselves quickly when exposed to the initially hostile environment created by the new drugs. In the last few months, bacteriologists have bred strains of pneumococci, streptococci and other common germs which are practically immune to the sulfa drugs, penicillin...
...Jumps Ahead. In clinical experience, too, doctors have been meeting drug-resistant infections which they attribute to new mutations among the bacteria. Gonorrheal infections now often do not respond as readily to the sulfa drugs as they did a few years ago. Penicillin is still effective against the disease; but the British Medical Journal, reviewing recent research, warns "against the idea that penicillin will necessarily continue indefinitely to cure nearly every case...
...respiratory disease which hit the Navy and the Army Air Forces in 1944 failed to respond to the sulfa drugs which had previously been effective against similar infections. Last week a group of Stanford bacteriologists traced the epidemic to a sturdy strain of streptococci which had "become more resistant by mutation...