Medicine: New Wonder Drug

The wonder drug, sulfanilamide, has cured apparently hopeless streptococcus infections, but it has also caused many a headache, and worse—nausea, dizziness, fever, even mild, temporary forms of insanity. For some patients, sulfanilamide is plain poison.

Last week it looked as though the problem of sulfa poisoning was solved. Dr. Perrin Long of Johns Hopkins reported a new, innocuous relative of sulfanilamide: sulfadiazine. A compound of sulfanilamide and part of vitamin B, the new drug, which is swallowed with water or injected, turns the same trick sulfanilamide does, plays no tricks on the patient.

Said Dr. Long: “Instead of feeling miserable, as with the other sulfa* compounds, patients who have taken sulfadiazine feel fine next day and start asking for food.” The drug, he told his colleagues, is apparently as effective as its relatives in cases of pneumonia, gonorrhea, various streptococcic and staphylococcic infections.

In the last eight years, chemists have concocted 1,200 sulfur-bearing drugs. But only five, including sulfanilamide and sulfadiazine, can be used in the human body. The other three: ¶ Sulfapyridine, a specific for pneumonia. In the last year, this drug, which is used together with serums, reduced the pneumonia deaths in the U. S. by half. > Sulfathiazole, specific for dread staphylococcic infections.

> A brand-new compound called sulfaguanidine. This drug cures dysentery, the disease which laid millions of soldiers low in World War I. Last winter, Dr. Eli Kennerly Marshall Jr., of Johns Hopkins, fell ill with dysentery. He decided to try sulfaguanidine, a form of sulfanilamid which remains in the intestines to fight dysentery germs, instead of seeping into the blood stream. Dr. Marshall has already shipped a supply of his drug to the British forces in Egypt.

Scientists Earl Ralph Norris and James Hauschildt, of the University of Washington, announced discovery of a new vitamin, found in yeast and liver, that prevents baldness. They dubbed it “inositol.” The vitamin, said bald Dr. Norris worked beautifully on mice. But it killed them.

-A prefix meaning a compound of sulfur and ammonia. Sulfa is medical shorthand for sul-fonatnide.