Medicine: Pneumonia Preventive

Next month every one of the 300,000 Civilian Conservation Corps enrollees who is willing will get a hypodermic injection in his arm. In consequence it is hoped that no more than 300 of them will develop pneumonia this winter, and only ten of them will die from this disease, which regularly kills 100,000 U. S. people each year. But those CCC men who refuse the injections will not be so lucky. According to the averages, pneumonia will fell two out of every thousand of them, and one out of eleven who take sick may expect to die.

Last week bacteriologists and chemists of the Army Medical School in Washington busily prepared this new preventive. To avoid adulteration they worked in glass cages, sterilized each morning by live steam and ventilated all day by sterile, conditioned air. Before the men entered the cages, which contained no germs except those in test tubes, flasks and 5-gal. demijohns, they changed every stitch of clothing.

With those precautions the bacteriologists cultured germs, treated therewith chemicals, eventually produced a whitish-tan, sugar-like substance called SSS ‘”Soluble Specific Substance”).* Dissolved in salt water and injected under the skin, it stimulates the blood to develop antibodies which kill specific germs. There are 32 different types of pneumococci. SSS is effective only against Types I and II, which cause half of the cases of pneumonia in this country. The inventor of Soluble Specific Substance, Dr. Lloyd Derr Felton, who had experimented at Harvard and now at Johns Hopkins, hopes to develop similar sugary substances to be used against other pneumonia types. But before he can turn all of his attention to that effort, he must finish supervising the production of the CCC’s SSS supply. This is costing the Government 5¢ an injection. Civilians may be able to buy it for $1 a dose. But to them none is yet for sale.

*Not to be confused with the old patent medicine SSS (“Swift’s Sure Specific”) which used to be sold as a “blood purifier” (i.e., syphilis cure), and now is sold as a tonic.