New Syphilis Cure

In Manhattan's Mount Sinai Hospital last week, a crowd of doctors from all over the eastern U. S. stared fixedly at a glass jar suspended above a patient's bed. The patient had syphilis. From the bottom of the jar, a yellowish fluid trickled through a flexible glass tube into a needle inserted in the vein between his elbow and wrist. Proudly the patient grinned at his distinguished guests, flexed his arm. Snapped his nurse: "Don't show off." The apparatus was an ordinary "Murphy drip," long used for glucose feedings.

In the jar was no ordinary fluid, but a sugary solution of mapharsen, one of the earlier of the 950-odd arsenic compounds invented by Paul Ehrlich. While the drug gently seeped into the patient's veins (two drops every three seconds), young Dr. William Leifer explained to the visitors one of the most remarkable advances in the treatment of syphilis since Chemist Ehrlich discovered arsphenamine (606).

With the drip method, said Dr. Harold Thomas Hyman, early syphilis can be cured in five days.

So powerful is arsphenamine that doctors can give it only in single doses extending over a period of 18 months.

But by slowly dripping its weaker relative, mapharsen, into the bloodstream for eight hours a day, Drs. Hyman and Leifer and the third associate, Dr. Louis Chargin, eliminate the "shock" of relatively large injections, build up blood tolerance to huge concentrations of the essential arsenic. During a five-day treatment, a patient absorbs about two and a half gallons of mapharsen solution.

The doctors first tried neoarsphenamine in their Murphy drip, but found it "too dangerous." Mapharsen, which is less toxic, was discarded by Ehrlich because it was too unstable. But modern chemists have "set" the drug.

In the last seven years Dr. Hyman et al. have treated 376 syphilitic men.

Score: 375 cured, one lost. Mostly charity cases, patients were paid a dollar to return to the hospital for regular checkups extending over a period of two or three years. Some patients, said Dr. Hyman, need a second five-day treatment after several months. The entire course costs only $82 a patient, as contrasted with an average of $300 for the standard 18 months of arsphenamine injections. Drawback to mass cures of the 600,000 victims of early syphilis in the U. S. is the fact that drip technique can be used only in hospitals, not in doctors' offices.

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