Quick VD Cure?

If primary syphilis and gonorrhea could be cured simultaneously in three days with only one injection (45-c- worth of penicillin), it would be big medical news indeed. It was reported last week that such good news is not an impossible hope. Dr. R. C. Arnold of the U.S. Public Health Services' Venereal Disease Control Research Laboratory announced that in 85 test cases, a single injection of 300,000 units (one cubic centimeter) of penicillin made syphilis noninfectious within 72 hours, and has kept it that way for most patients during the six to eight months the experiment has been running.*

Some penicillin treatments now in use for syphilis and gonorrhea: require as many as 100 consecutive injections over a period of eight days, use from 2,000,000 to 9,000,000 units of the drug. Secret of the speedup and increased effectiveness of the new penicillin treatment, still in the experimental stage: the drug is dissolved in oil with 2% aluminum monostearate. The process coats the penicillin particles, which are ordinarily absorbed in the bloodstream within two to four hours, and keeps them at work for 72 hours.

Whether the new treatments will prove a permanent cure remains to be seen. When arsenic was first in vogue for syphilis, a few treatments often healed the sore and temporarily made Wassermann tests negative; ten years or so later, the patient sometimes suffered from the late stages of syphilis (insanity, paralysis and heart disease). Conclusive results of this or any other penicillin routine will not be known for at least ten years.

* Gonorrhea is apparently knocked out in six hours.

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