Medicine: Overworked Remedy

Penicillin is still the safest of all drugs, considering the good it does, and it is still enormously effective against some kinds of germs—Dr. Maxwell Finland of Harvard Medical School grants penicillin all that. But, he warned New England colleagues last week, it has lost much of its punch against germs of the staphylococcus group. Reason: it has been too widely used.

In a recent series of staphylococcus infections at Boston City Hospital, Dr. Finland found that three times out of four, the germs came of a strain that had learned to defy penicillin. Since many of the patients had never had penicillin before, the resistance had not developed during their treatment; they must have picked up germs already resistant, from other patients who had been dosed with penicillin. Most staphylococcus infections are minor (e.g., boils), but even so, said Dr. Finland, “there was an appreciable number of fatalities among the cases which did not respond to penicillin.”

Dr. Finland’s advice: penicillin should be withheld from all cases of common colds and other minor, miscellaneous ailments, unless there is a clear and present danger that more serious bacterial infection is setting in.