Good Report

A new antibiotic named terramycin, which had been laboriously isolated from a piece of Indiana soil, was announced early this year (TIME, Feb. 6) by Charles Pfizer & Co. of Brooklyn. Last week in Manhattan, at a clinicians' conference on terramycin, the accumulated evidence seemed to show that the new antibiotic has made the grade.

The only way to chart the effectiveness of a new drug is to test it on sick people under varying conditions. At the Manhattan meeting, doctors reported that terramycin was effective against some urinary tract infections, bacterial pneumonia, atypical pneumonia, undulant fever whooping cough and amoebic dysentery.' Boston's Dr. Chester S. Keefer, one of the nation's leading authorities on antibiotics, cautiously noted that clinicians will need at least two or three more years of tests and reports to arrive at definitive conclusions about terramycin. Meanwhile, it is known that its toxic effect on people is not high. Experiments on rats indicate that terramycin (with streptomycin) is effective in preventing death from infection following irradiation poisoning, during which the body is unable to maintain its normal defense against germs.

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