Forward Steps

New treatments with old & new drugs made medical news last week:

Typhoid fever is usually easy to prevent--thanks to modern sanitation and vaccination. But once the disease takes hold, doctors have had no specific cure. But a medical "mistake" in Malaya now offers hope.

Last spring a five-man team of doctors at the British Institute for Medical Research in Kuala Lumpur, about 200 miles from Singapore, began treating victims of scrub typhus with the new antibiotic* called chloromycetin (TIME, Nov. 10). Chloromycetin reduced the fever in one day. But in two cases the fever did not go down until the third day. The doctors checked again, found that the two third-day patients actually had typhoid fever. They picked eight cases of known typhoid fever, again reduced the fever in three days. Three cases of typhoid in Baltimore hospitals later responded the same way.

Doctors hesitate to make claims on the basis of only 13 cases, but chloromycetin (which is still scarce) is definitely promising against typhoid.

Myanesin, a new synthetic drug developed from glycerin, relaxes muscles of patients during operations. Since last September the drug's developer, Dr. Frank M. Berger, has been working with Dr. R. Plato Schwartz to find new uses for the drug. If it relaxes muscles during operations, the doctors reasoned, would it also work on muscles tied up by disease?

Many otherwise unrelated diseases produce spasms, tremor or stiffness of muscles: infantile paralysis, cerebral palsy, chronic rheumatism, arthritis, Parkinson's disease (paralysis agitans), apoplexy, Pott's disease (tuberculosis of the spine), hardening of the arteries. The doctors tried the drug, given by mouth, on 59 patients; all but one showed improvement--sometimes in five minutes. Drs. Berger and Schwartz consider their work still in the experimental stage.

Syphilis does not show up for about three weeks after the patient has been exposed. The newest treatment has been an expensive 7-to 16-day series of penicillin shots.

Two years ago Drs. Arthur G. Schoch and Lee J. Alexander of Dallas' Syphilis and Venereal Disease Clinic started looking for a quick way to knock out syphilis while it is still in the incubation stage. They think they have found it. Their "abortive treatment" consists of injection of 900,000 units of penicillin, three cubic centimeters of bismuth ethylcamphorate, 0.05 to 0.06 grams of arsenoxide. The drugs cost only one-tenth of the full penicillin treatment, and the injections take only five minutes. Out of 148 patients who had been in contact with known syphilitics, 127 were under observation for three months; only six developed early syphilis. Of the six, three were considered definite cases of reinfection after treatment, and the other three probably were also.

*Doctors are experimenting with at least 122 promising antibiotics. But only the Big Two--penicillin and streptomycin--are widely used on human patients. Runners-up: Aerosporin, chloromycetin, bacitracin, polymixin, gramicidin.

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