Medicine: Soap and Flu

That soap and hot water will kill pneumococci, streptococci, gonococci, meningococci, diphtheria bacilli, and the syphilis spirochete, doctors have long known. Last week in the Journal of Experimental Medicine, Bacteriologists Charles Chester Stock and Thomas Francis Jr. of New York University told of their successful experiments in making influenza vaccine from virus and soap solution.

They minced the virus-choked lungs of mice infected with flu, made a brew so powerful that it killed healthy mice even if diluted a million times. But when a suspension of virus was mixed with equal amounts of hand-soap or a fatty acid solution, allowed to stand for 90 minutes, and injected into scores of normal mice, none of them came down with flu. In fact, said the scientists, once vaccinated, the mice easily withstood huge doses of straight virus.

Exactly how the soap works—whether it dissolves the “armor” of the virus, or clutches it in a chemical grip—Drs. Stock & Francis have not yet discovered. Nor are they quite ready to try their mixture as a vaccine on human beings.

Last week Health News, official bulletin of the New York State Department of Health, noted that “sand soaps” used by factory workers were often more damaging to the skin than industrial irritants, offered the following cleansing formula: “Equal parts of sulfonated neat’s foot oil and liquid petrolatum containing 25% gelatin … are added to white granulated corn meal in the proportion of one-and-a-half parts, by weight, of corn meal and one part, by weight, of the oil mixture. To prevent growth of mold or bacteria a 0.5 solution of chlorobutanol is added.”