Capsules
By Pfizer Laboratories.
> All too many doctors fail to keep up with new medical developments, and to remedy this, authorities in some states are taking action. The Oregon Medical Association (2,400 members) was the first to make continued training a condition of membership. A physician must spend at least 50 hours a year attending professional meetings and courses or preparing and publishing research reports. As a result of this requirement, 17 members have recently resigned or been expelled, losing various benefits, though not the right to practice. A New Mexico law to take effect in November will jeopardize even that, requiring doctors to average 40 educational hours annually or lose their licenses.
> Though epilepsy can be controlled by drugs, it has generally been regarded as incurable. New evidence, however, suggests that some children outgrow epilepsy. Researchers at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis report in the New England Journal of Medicine that children kept free of convulsions by long-term drug treatment can go on without seizures even after the medicine is stopped. Of 148 epileptic children who had been taking anticonvulsant preparations for at least four years, only 24% suffered new attacks after the end of drug use.
>Ever since researchers found that a certain something in the diet promotes the growth of strong, healthy bone and thus combats rickets, they have believed that it must be a vitamin. For half a century this something has been famous as "vitamin D." Virtually all U.S. milk and much bread and breakfast cereals are fortified with it by a process developed at the University of Wisconsin in 1924 by Biologist Harry Steenbock. He patented the technique and the royalties have enriched Steenbock's Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation. Now a biochemist and Steenbock protege at the same university, Dr. Hector DeLuca, says that the stuff is not a vitamin like the other simple, essential components in food, but a hormonal substance with a complex biochemical role. DeLuca also has evidence that the substance must undergo metabolic changes in the liver and kidneys before it can perform its function of regulating calcium levels in bone and blood. Whatever scientists may decide about the true nature of the basic D material, DeLuca concedes that the misnomer on milk cartons and bread wrappers will probably stick.
> All U.S. polio vaccines until now have been made from killed or attenuated viruses grown in cultures of cells taken from monkey kidneys. The process and the vaccines are highly effective, but manufacturers--and some physicians--fear that other viruses lurking in the monkey kidneys may slip into the vaccine with unpredictable effects on the human recipient. One stray monkey virus has turned up in some vaccine samples. Many virologists believe that it would be better to make the vaccine from viruses grown in human cells, specifically in a strain developed by Dr. Leonard Hayflick and Dr. Paul S. Moorhead. Originally derived from the lung tissue of a Swedish aborted fetus, this strain is pure, will reproduce itself 50 times and allows a huge yield of cellular material. Britain already uses polio vaccine produced in these cells, and the U.S.S.R. is switching to it. But for years the U.S. regulatory agency, the Division of Biologies Standards in the National Institutes of Health, has refused to license such a vaccine. Now DBS has set guidelines for U.S. manufacturers and is expected soon to approve a polio vaccine produced in Hayflick's cultures, to be marketed by Pfizer Laboratories.
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