For a Female Complaint

After the narrow escape from the thalidomide disaster last summer, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has been understandably cautious about approving any new drug. But last week U.S. doctors were putting unprecedented pressure on FDA to approve Flagyl, a new drug that is the most potent remedy to date for a common female complaint.

The white vaginal discharge, leucorrhea, is sometimes caused by infection with bacteria, and when it is, the familiar wonder drugs will usually cure it. But the most common cause is a tiny parasite, the protozoan Trichomonas vaginalis, against which medicine has had no effective defense. Of 50 or more remedies listed in doctors' reference books, all must be used locally. Flagyl (chemical name: metronidazole), synthesized by France's Rhone-Poulenc laboratories, is the first effective trichomonacide taken by mouth; it gets into the bloodstream and can track down the parasites in internal glands where some of them hide. For this reason, it is also the first useful drug for men, who often pick up the parasites from their wives and may suffer urethritis or prostatitis.

It is more than four years since French doctors began reporting Flagyl cure rates as high as 100% in patients of both sexes. Chicago's G. D. Searle & Co., U.S. licensee for Flagyl, has supplied it for "investigational use only" to 750 doctors, who have treated almost 50,000 patients. U.S. investigators are as enthusiastic about Flagyl as their colleagues in France, Britain and Canada. Last week the A.M.A.'s Council on Drugs, which has never endorsed a drug not yet licensed by FDA, reported favorably on Flagyl, suggesting simply that "it should not be administered to women during the first three months of pregnancy."

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