Medicine: Gonorrhea Carriers

When, three years ago, doctors learned the spectacular, four-day, 40¢ sulfanilamide cure for gonorrhea, they gave a short, loud hail, straightway began the practice of dosing their patients with sulfanilamide tablets for a week or two, then discharging them as cured.

Last fortnight, in the American Journal of Public Health, Drs. Charles Milton Carpenter and Robert Sturgeon Westphal, bacteriologists of the University of Rochester, shocked the medical world with some dismal after-facts on sulfanilamide and gonorrhea. It is true, said they, that the drug removes the symptoms of gonorrhea. But patients often harbor the germs long after they are pronounced cured, thus becoming “gonorrhea carriers,” able to infect other people, though apparently hale themselves.

That there are gonorrhea carriers, doctors have long known. Drs. Carpenter and Westphal found that sulfanilamide produced carriers when they examined over a thousand inmates of New York State’s model Attica Prison. Of these, 392 had once had gonorrhea. All had been discharged by doctors as cured. When the bacteriologists made careful germ cultures from their patients’ specimens, they found that eleven men still harbored gonococci.

Carriers, the doctors went on, infect their wives after a “socalled sulfanilamide cure,” make “absolutely symptomless carriers” of them too. How long the stubborn germs persist, how they can be conquered, the doctors do not know.

The Rochester scientists urged that physicians should remember two vital facts: 1) gonococci quickly develop resistance to sulfanilamide and its relative sulfapyridine, even when these drugs are given in increasing amounts; 2) only sure test of the presence of tricky gonococci is careful laboratory culture,.