Medicine: Flu’s End?

One day last winter Dr. John Henry McLeod of Washington bent over an eight-month-old baby who lay coughing and rattling in his crib. The baby had a bad case of flu, as he could tell for sure when he examined under the microscope slides made from the baby’s tears and saliva. What he saw was swarms of vicious pneumococci and tiny, rod-shaped, bloodsucking Hemophilus influenzae, most common of the numerous organisms connected with flu. To combat the pneumococci, he gave the baby injections of the remarkable new drug sulfapyridine. Against the Hemophili he had no weapons, for common influenza is still a mystery to medical science.

Yet, the baby, instead of dying, “showed marked improvement . . . within 24 hours,” and in a few days the sulfapyridine conquered flu germs as well as pneumococci. Happy Dr. McLeod passed the glad news on to the U. S. Public Health Service, and Bacteriologist Margaret Pittman set to work in her laboratory to make sure his lucky hit was indeed a hit.

Last fortnight the U. S. Public Health Reports published the results of her experiments. In a typical experiment she divided 25 mice into five groups. Four groups were fed minute amounts of sulfapyridine, varying from one to eight milligrams. The fifth group got no medicine at all. Half an hour after the drug was given, each mouse was inoculated with enough Hemophili to kill him 100 times over. Results: 1) all the unprotected mice died; 2) “no mouse died which received eight milligrams of the drug”; 3) the number of hours the other mice lived “was directly proportional to the amount of drug administered.”

Bacteriologist Pittman was not completely satisfied, urged that sulfapyridine be given “further trial.” Her experiments had shown that “[sulfapyridine] did not prevent the bacteria from entering the bloodstream, but it apparently retarded their increase in the blood.”

Although “further trial” may well prove sulfapyridine the flu cure doctors have awaited for 20 years, there is small chance that they will prescribe it as such this winter. For sulfapyridine must be handled as carefully as dynamite. It often gives patients nausea, headaches, “nerves,” even delirium. Further, the fact that the drug lays low Hemophili is no guarantee that it will act with equal success against the combined forces of the six or seven other less common organisms which also occur in flu.