Word: toxins
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Warfield Monroe Firor of Johns Hopkins has long worried about this paradox. About 18 months ago he got the hunch that the tetanus toxin which causes the first stage of the disease must be different from the poison which causes the second fatal stage. To test his hunch he injected both small and large amounts of tetanus toxin directly into the spinal cords of more than 60 dogs. The injections were always followed by muscular paroxysms and death, even though 100 times the neutralizing dose of antitoxin was in the bloodstream and even though some doses of the poison were...
Last week Dr. Firor told members of the Society of University Surgeons, meeting at Rochester, N. Y., the conclusions of his research. As long as tetanus toxin has not had time to enter the spinal cord, he said, tetanus antitoxin can neutralize the poison and check the disease. But once toxin enters the cord, it somehow becomes transformed into a new poison. "The new substance is not attacked by the present antitoxin," said Dr. Firor. In answer to questions of enthusiastic colleagues, he said that he will shortly try to prepare a second antitoxin which will cure the final stages...
...Those most often affected are the great nerves in arms and legs. Sharp pains dart along them, causing intense agony. Muscles may lose their tone, permit the limbs to dangle. The diagnostic problem is to discover and treat the original cause of the neural inflammation. This may be some toxin absorbed by the system, such as poisonous metals (lead, arsenic, bismuth, mercury) or carbon compounds (alcohol, Jamaica ginger, carbon monoxide, ether). Toxins may be generated, among other ailments, by childbed fever or diabetes. Neuritis may be the result of infections like diphtheria, typhoid, scarlet fever, measles, rheumatism, mumps, gonorrhea, smallpox...
...cord. In Science last week Dr. Toomey flatly declared: "In the human being the causative agent usually enters the digestive system," whence it passes to the spine by way of sympathetic nerves. According to Dr. Toomey true infantile paralysis is caused by a virus which attacks nerves after a toxin created by the virus makes those nerves vulnerable. The paralysis which Dr. Brodie and other experimenters produce in monkeys, says Dr. Toomey, "is not the kind of poliomyelitis that is seen in the human being." One plain reason: the monkey's four legs become paralyzed; the human being...
...years ago Dr. Newell Simmons Ferry, whom Parke, Davis & Co. had hired from the University of Tennessee, began to hunt for a toxin which the meningococci might excrete. The epidemic of four years ago spurred him on, led him to develop an antitoxin in the blood of horses...