Gesundheit!

It was a week of tantalizing news for 6,000,000 U.S. allergy victims--but most of them will probably go right on sneezing through this summer at least.

First, the eminently cautious and reliable Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine detailed the powers of a new drug named Anthallan. "Relief of a high percentage of cases" of hay fever was claimed for it.

At Manhattan's Columbia University Medical Center, Dr. Alexander D. Ghiselin had given 44 victims of seasonal and non-seasonal allergic "wet noses" (but not skin rashes), a three-week course of Anthallan capsules. Forty of the patients were relieved of 25% to 100% of their misery for as long as eight months after treatment. The drug was developed, after 25 years of experiment, by Pharmacologist Walter S. Loewe, who came to the U.S. from Heidelberg in 1934, now teaches at the University of Utah.

Just marketed, and discussed last week in the Journal of Allergy, was another new hay fever drug called Benadryl. Experiments have indicated that Benadryl is an all-or-none drug; it gives complete relief to some 50% to 85% of allergy victims, helps the rest of them not a bit. When it works, it relieves both rashes and runny noses, sometimes makes patients drowsy, must be taken every few hours in capsule form.

Still another new drug, Pyribenzamine, has given similar results. Like Benadryl, it suppresses allergy symptoms by acting against histamine--a substance which is released in the blood stream and causes tissues to break out as rashes or wet noses (or so the latest allergy theory goes). Anthallan, in contrast, behaves more like ephedrine, the well-known drug which gives relief by shrinking the mucous membranes.

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