Medicine: One at a Time

Dogs droop and often die of distemper, a virus disease which affects them very much as influenza affects human beings. For experimental purposes scientists infect monkeys with the virus of distemper, just as they infect them with the virus of infantile paralysis. Last year, at Valhalla, N. Y., Dr. Gilbert Julias Dalldorf and associates* tried to inoculate monkeys with strains of both diseases at the same time and found that monkeys will not catch infantile paralysis while suffering from distemper. Last fortnight the Rockefeller Institute’s Journal of Experimental Medicine presented the details of the experiments, as well as the scientists’ explanation for the mutual exclusiveness of these diseases.

As scientists now understand immunity to disease, 1) the blood develops substances which destroy certain germs and viruses that invade the body, or 2) body tissues develop resistance to agents of disease. Neither explanation covers the temporary immunity to infantile paralysis which distemper confers on monkeys. Dr. Dalldorf reasoned that “both viruses require, for their propagation, a common cell protein or other substance which the conjugation of the first virus exhausts and thereby prevents the multiplication of [the] other virus.” If he and his associates are correct, they believe that they have discovered “a new immunity mechanism in the virus field.” And if they have done so, they may also have discovered the reason for the “seasonal incidence” of certain diseases, why infantile paralysis occurs mainly in summer, influenza in winter.

Following their announcement came another of possibly greater future importance to the treatment of all virus diseases — the common cold, measles, smallpox, infantile paralysis, influenza, distemper. The Columbia University bacteriologist who proved that colds and influenza are due to viruses, ruddy, reticent Dr. Alphonse Raymond Dochez, reported in Science that, with the help of Dr. Charles Arthur Slanetz, he has prevented and cured distemper in dogs, cats and ferretsby injections of a new drug—sodium sulfanilyl sulfanilate. This drug, a sulfur derivative like sulfanilamide which cures certain bacterial diseases (due to streptococcus, etc.), appears, according to Drs. Dochez & Slanetz, to be the “first chemical agent to have such definite therapeutic action in an infection due to a filterable virus. The range of its activity in virus diseases remains to be explored.”

* Bacteriologist Margaret Douglass, Dr. Horace Eddy Robinson.