Pyromen v. Paralysis

When Shirley Ann Schopp came down with polio last year, her father & mother worried, like every father & mother in the same plight, about the lasting paralysis that might follow. For months, it seemed that their worst fears were confirmed: three-year-old Shirley was almost completely paralyzed. But Shirley's father is Dr. Alvin C. Schopp, an orthopedist at St. Louis University and St. Anthony's Hospital. He had been searching for years for something that would help to give back vitality to nerves damaged by the polio virus. A new drug, Pyromen, had just come in for testing.

Dr. Schopp talked things over with his wife, and they decided that Pyromen should be tried first on Shirley. "I was scared," Dr. Schopp says now. "But I knew the antidotes in case we needed them. We tried the drug cautiously, but in two weeks we could see improvement. We stopped the dosage for a while, then tried smaller doses and heavier doses. We were groping in the dark. But she has steadily improved. Shirley could barely move her arms before, now she runs around raising hell. She has only one slight muscle weakness in her left leg, and that's improving."

Minor Crisis. As soon as Shirley began to get better, Dr. Schopp and two colleagues began using Pyromen on alternate polio patients admitted to St. Anthony's in the acute stage. The doctors soon found that the drug seemed to produce a minor crisis of its own: usually, a rise in temperature, often accompanied by muscle pains or cramps. None of these effects was lasting; in fact, the drug reaction seemed to be essential to successful treatment. If patients did not react to small doses, they had to have bigger doses. Then, nearly always within three days, they started to get better far more quickly than others, similarly ill, who got no Pyromen.

Patients admitted with such severely weakened muscles that they could not turn their heads or sit up soon began to move about and sit up in bed. Just as striking, the doctors report, was the change in the patients' disposition. Many, including babies, who had been irritable and ornery and unwilling to eat, promptly cheered up, became alert and cooperative, and enjoyed their food.

Made by Bacteria. So far, Dr. Schopp and his colleagues report, they have treated 53 patients with Pyromen and compared them with 51 who did not get the drug. It is clear that Pyromen is no cure for polio. Among victims of bulbar polio treated with Pyromen, there were as many deaths (seven) as there were among the others. Also, polio is so unpredictable a disease that doctors may easily be fooled, and credit a drug for a patient's natural improvement. But, says Dr. Schopp, this admittedly sketchy study indicates that Pyromen helps virus-ravaged nerves to rebuild themselves so that they can again assert control over the muscles.

Pyromen is a complex, sugarlike chemical manufactured by bacteria related to the organism which makes blue pus in wounds. Neither Dr. Schopp nor anybody else has any idea yet as to how it works on damaged nerves, if it really does. A versatile substance, it is being tried in the treatment of allergy. And doctors are keeping their fingers crossed while Pyromen is tested on other kinds of paralysis and (at the Mayo Clinic) on multiple sclerosis.

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