Report on Streptomycin

The custodian of the nation's meager supply of streptomycin was on the hot seat. To Boston's Dr. Chester S. Keefer* it seemed that everyone wanted the powerful new drug--foreign nations; Congressmen (for their constituents); distraught fathers & mothers, anxious to try anything that might cure a sick child. Newspapers were featuring swallow-hard stories about babies wasting away for want of streptomycin.

Writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Dr. Keefer brought doctors up to date on the drug. Said he: "The primary interest. . . is to determine its effectiveness and toxicity in certain infections which are not susceptible to treatment with sulfonamides, penicillin and other therapeutic agents. . . . Much remains to be learned."

Of the available supply of streptomycin, the National Research Council has 31%. (The remainder is divided among the Army, Navy, U.S. Public Health Service, Veterans Administration.) No physician is charged for it. No patient who receives it pays for it. A full report of each case in which streptomycin is used must be sent for analysis to the Committee on Chemotherapeutics.

Diseases now being treated with the drug include: typhoid, food poisoning, undulant fever and rabbit fever; certain infections of the genitourinary tract; some types of blood poisoning, meningitis, pneumonia and bacterial endocarditis. Limited research is being conducted in tuberculosis.

Concluded Dr. Keefer: "Because of the restricted supply ... it is obvious that patients selected to receive [streptomycin] must be those whom it can be expected to benefit and from whose treatment useful, needed information can be derived. Under present conditions many requests will inevitably have to be refused."

* Chairman of the Committee on Chemotherapeutics of the National Research Council which controls streptomycin, its study and use.

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