Against Smallpox

Anybody who has been recently and properly vaccinated, by a doctor who checked the injection site to make sure the shot "took," is most unlikely to get smallpox. But when smallpox erupts where many people have never been vaccinated, or were vaccinated too long ago, doctors face a dilemma. A crash program of vaccination and revaccination may help, but nearly always there are victims already infected for whom this is too late. Gamma globulin has reduced the severity of many cases, but the stuff is scarce, costly, and seldom available where it is needed.

An international team of researchers has just reported in the London medical journal Lancet that a few doses of a relatively inexpensive drug, easily taken by mouth, protected all but three of 1,101 people in Madras who had slept in the same rooms as recent smallpox cases. Among 1,126 similar contacts who did not get the drug, there were 78 cases of smallpox and twelve deaths. The drug, N-methylisatin beta-thiosemi-carbazone, has no U.S. trade name, though Wellcome Laboratories has labeled it 33T57. It is no cure for smallpox and no substitute for vaccination, but should prove valuable in helping to prevent the spread of smallpox among the unvaccinated or those who have been improperly vaccinated.

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