Medicine: Streptomycin News

“Do not think penicillin is a cure-all,” said penicillin’s discoverer, Sir Alexander Fleming on THE MARCH OF TIME last week. “It has an extraordinary effect on many of the common microbes . . . but on others it is quite inactive. The publicity given to penicillin has caused me to receive thousands of letters from sufferers from tuberculosis and other diseases which penicillin does not touch.” But as Sir Alexander long ago predicted, another mold-produced antibiotic—streptomycin (TIME, Jan. 29)—has given promise of succeeding where penicillin fails. Recent encouraging news of streptomycin’s performance:

¶In five cases of typhoid and two of undulant fever, reported by Philadelphia’s Dr. Hobart Reimann to the New York Academy of Medicine, streptomycin chalked up five cures out of seven. The results are still far from conclusive, but the failures, said Dr. Reimann, might easily have been caused by incorrect dosage and a still insufficient supply of the drug.

¶Streptomycin has cleared up many an intestinal and urinary tract infection. The drug’s discoverer, Dr. Selman A. Waksman, reports that when used before an abdominal operation it tends to prevent post-operative infections.

¶Tested on tuberculous guinea pigs at Stanford University, streptomycin kept infection down to 5.8% of a theoretically possible 100% infection. (The amount of t.b. a guinea pig has is determined by autopsy.) Other guinea pigs, given tuberculosis bacilli but no streptomycin, developed 67% infection. Trials on a few human patients have just begun.