Penicillin

The wonder drug of 1943 may prove to be penicillin, obscured since its discovery in Britain in 1929, only now getting its thorough sickroom trial. It is made from a mold (TIME, Sept. 15, 1941) by a slow, laborious process. All the penicillin in the U.S. at any one time has never been more than about enough to treat 30 cases.

Experiments have already shown that penicillin attacks certain bacteria more successfully than sulfa drugs do. Unlike sulfa drugs, penicillin's effects are not inhibited by pus and other materials formed in infected wounds. Used in low concentrations in the blood stream, penicillin's action is bacteriostatic, i.e., it prevents bacteria from multiplying and renders them easy prey for white blood corpuscles. Penicillin solutions strong enough to kill bacteria may safely be injected under the skin near a wound or used as a dressing.*

Under National Research Council supervision, several doctors are now making small-scale penicillin trials, but their work is a military secret. No secret is the drug's use on Cocoanut Grove fire casualties (TIME, Dec. 7) at Massachusetts General Hospital. Each patient got sulfadiazine to prevent streptococcus infection on burned surfaces and then, if he still had a temperature six days later, intramuscular injections of 5,000 units of penicillin every four hours to prevent staphylococcus infection. It is notable that no patient so treated died of staphylococcus blood poisoning.

"It Seems Likely. . . ." Among the first to experiment with penicillin in the U.S. were Drs. Dorothy H. Heilman and Wallace Edgar Herrell of the Mayo Clinic. Judging from their work and that of others, penicillin should be highly useful against an impressive array of bacteria: Staphylococcus aureus and Streptococcus pyogenes (pus formers), Diplococcus pneumoniae (usual germ of lobar pneumonia, often present in cerebrospinal meningitis and septicemia), gonorrhea germs, Neisseria intracellularis (cerebrospinal meningitis), Streptococcus viridans (heart infection), Actinomyces bovis (lumpy jaw of cattle).

Penicillin has the disadvantages of being hard to make, easy to spoil--it must be kept at refrigerator temperatures and would be very inconvenient for battlefield use. But, since it may fill many gaps in chemotherapy, the doctors following it feel like hounds on a hot scent.

* Gramicidin, a drug extracted from soil bacteria and easily confused with penicillin, is also recommended as a wound dressing but is extremely dangerous if it gets into the blood stream.

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