Word: sulfa
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Magic Five. During the last three years in Manhattan, Pharmacologist Marvin Russell Thompson and Biochemist Gustav Julius Martin of the Warner Institute for Therapeutic Research have painstakingly poisoned 30,000 rats, mice and rabbits in their research work. When they gave the animals huge doses of sulfa drugs, or of common poisons, the scientists found that five basic substances present in normal blood promptly dwindled or disappeared. The vital chemicals: 1) ascorbic acid (vitamin C); 2) choline, a nitrogen compound, a constituent of nerve tissue; 3) cystine, a sulfur-containing compound found in hair and finger nails; 4) glycine...
...example, arsenic, which killed 65% of the rats, killed only 15% when it was given with the detoxicants; a dose of sulfathiazole that would ordinarily have killed 40% of a large group of mice killed none. At the same time, the mixture seemed to strengthen the curative powers of sulfa drugs...
Last week it looked as though the problem of sulfa poisoning was solved. Dr. Perrin Long of Johns Hopkins reported a new, innocuous relative of sulfanilamide: sulfadiazine. A compound of sulfanilamide and part of vitamin B, the new drug, which is swallowed with water or injected, turns the same trick sulfanilamide does, plays no tricks on the patient...
Said Dr. Long: "Instead of feeling miserable, as with the other sulfa* compounds, patients who have taken sulfadiazine feel fine next day and start asking for food." The drug, he told his colleagues, is apparently as effective as its relatives in cases of pneumonia, gonorrhea, various streptococcic and staphylococcic infections...
...prefix meaning a compound of sulfur and ammonia. Sulfa is medical shorthand for sul-fonatnide...