AN EPIC IN AMERICAN HEALTH
Stafford, Jane
An Epic In American Health By JANE STAFFORD TODAY the 2 principal venereal diseases are being treated successfully in 9 days and in 4 hours. A mere 8 years ago the usual time of treatment was 18...
...In New Orleans the attack was on gonorrhea only...
...WITH U. S. Public Health Service aid...
...With penicillin as the weapon against syphilis and gonorrhea, big cities such as New Orleans and Birmingham have been able to pioneer large scale attacks on venereal disease with good hope of victory...
...John F. Mahoney, wanted to study its effects on syphilis and gonorrhea, so he made his own penicillin...
...Yet these daring pioneer attempts led others to try other speed-ups for syphilis treatment...
...The one-day treatment was accomplished by combining the standard anti-syphilis medicines, bismuth and an arsenical, with fever...
...three rapid treatment centers or hospitals cared for those found in need of treatment for syphilis...
...If patients show no signs of syphilis 5 years after treatment, scientists will be more likely to declare penicillin a cure for syphilis...
...The penicillin was free at their doctor's office or health department clinics...
...Fever treatment had previously been found helpful in some cases of paresis, one of the late stages of syphilis in which the spirochetes attack the brain...
...Then .they are discharged as well, probably cured, and no longer capable of spreading the disease to others...
...What health officials do hope is that with so many thousands freed of venereal disease and thousands more well informed on the subject, the venereal disease fight in Birmingham, at least, may be reduced to the scope of mopping up action...
...a daring speed-up of syphilis treatment: Instead of giving the arsenical drug in small, weekly dosefa, they poured, or rather, dripped it directly into the" patient's veins all day long for 5 days...
...a 10,000-test-a-day laboratory was set up to check the blood of 300,000 "persons in Birmingham, and...
...PENICILLIN is not yet entitled to be called a cure for syphilis...
...That situation has been conquered too, and it is now possible to call these diseases by their correct medical names in public...
...If that can be achieved in one large city, the same battle plan can and doubtless will be followed elsewhere...
...Word of it got around and persons who had or suspected they had gonorrhea took to buying the pills and dosing themselves...
...Sulfanilamide treatment of gonorrhea was not 100 per cent satisfactory...
...Patients have to go to a hospital for the treatment...
...WOMEN gonorrhea victims, too, were able to benefit from the sulfa drug treatment, though previously treatment of this disease in women had been so unsatisfactory that.one authority declared: "It hardly deserves the name...
...Then came another break-through in the venereal disease fight...
...This was risky...
...It did not cure all the patients given it...
...Spearheading the drive to conquer the venereal diseases was the courageous insistence of Surgeon General Thomas Parran, U. S. Public Health Service, that the American people as well as their doctors and health officers learn to look on syphilis and gonorrhea as public health problems...
...Harry B. Eagle and Dr...
...There is still a chance that spirochetes are ' lurking in their bodies, undetectable by the most delicate tests but capable of causing damage to heart or brain or nervous system later...
...That helped free men and women from the tabu that kept them ignorant, many times, of what ailed them when they had caught syphilis or gonorrhea and kept them from seeking such treatment as medical men could give...
...The treatment, of course, had to be given in a hospital...
...Patients treating themselves generally stopped taking the pills when the symptoms cleared up, not knowing that gonorrhea germs might still be lurking in their bodies, still capable of causing serious illness and sterility...
...George Baehr, William Leifer, Louis Chargin and H. T. Hyman in New York City attempted Hundreds of 4-by-8-foot posters in Birmingham, Ala., during a recent campaign (upper left) in that city announced in giant letters: "Penicillin cures gonorrhea, in 4 hours" and "Treatment of syphilis with penicillin completed in 9 days...
...It did not take the chemists long, however, to produce better and still better sulfa drugs, ones that were more effective and easier to take...
...Gonorrhea patients flocked to the clinics and doctors' offices by the thousands...
...It is only 2 years since the first patients were treated...
...There they get "shots" of penicillin every hour day and night for 9 days...
...There is little wonder that medical men and public health workers now have hope of conquering these diseases that once caused pain, crippling disabilities, and lingering illness...
...SULFA drugs failed to stop the spirochetes that cause syphilis...
...The first real break-through in the fight against venereal disease, however, came with the discovery that sulfanilamide could cure the early symptoms of gonorrhea in 75 per cent of the cases...
...The results were so good he hardly dared to believe them...
...Instead of calling them "social" diseases, although they are really unsocial, we learned to think of them as contagious diseases like measles and smallpox...
...Ralph B. Hogan, of the U. S. Public Health Service and Johns Hopkins Medical School, reported good results with treatment programs that took 3 to 8 weeks of thrice-weekly injections of anti-syphilitic medicines...
...It is given in 3 injections at intervals of 2 hours...
...The New York group, however, were able to get enough arsenic drug into the patient's body within 5 days to stop the spirochetes without harming the patient...
...It cures gonorrhea in 07 per cent of the cases...
...One by one, as the penicillin got to work on the spirochetes in the patient's body, the tests changed from positive to negative...
...Penicillin treatment of gonorrhea is quick...
...In fact, the sulfa cure of gonorrhea became almost too easy...
...Penicillin when first tried for gonorrhea and syphilis was not generally available...
...Then came the discovery of penicillin and what seems to be the final break-through in the war against syphilis and gonorrhea...
...A mere 8 years ago the usual time of treatment was 18 months for syphilis and the treatment of gonorrhea was too often unsatisfactory...
...When he had enough he started giving it to patients with syphilis...
...Even the relatively safe arsenic compounds used to treat syphilis may cause toxic symptoms in some patients...
...When the most delicate tests of all, ones that were most likely to be positive if there was any syphilitic infection present, changed to negative, and were still negative some months after the treatment, Dr...
...That was dangerous...
...In Birmingham, with a state law requiring a blood test of all persons between 14 and 50 years of age, syphilis as well as gonorrhea was attacked...
...Placards on street lamp posts, cards on cars, buses and in store windows, radio announcements and newspaper publicity and advertising told the people of Birmingham that syphilis could be treated with penicillin in 9 days, that gonorrhea could be cured in 4 hours...
...A nurse and model (upper right) demonstrate treatment at one of the public health hospitals...
...At the U. S. Marine Hospital on Staten Island, one of the Public Health Service's ace venereal disease fighters, Dr...
...THIS swift treatment was not recommended for general use...
...This new VD conquest is largely due to penicillin, although there are other brilliant chapters in medicine's fight on these human ills...
...At present it rates as a quick, easy, safe and very promising treatment...
...Mahoney felt certain enough about the results to report them...
...Persons who caught this disease still had to go for treatment every week for 18 long months if they wanted to be cured...
...It is too much to hope that venereal diseases can be eradicated by this one 45-day campaign, powerful as it was...
...So much interest was aroused by these advances that the U. S. Public Health Service was able to set up in various parts of the country special hospitals, or rapid treatment centers, where patients could be sent to get one or another of the new, speedy treatments...
...Once these diseases were unmentionable in polite society...
...From 18 months to 5 days and then to one day went the speedup on syphilis treatment...
...Sulfa drugs are not safe enough to be used as home remedies...
...Here was a chemical that killed the germs of gonorrhea and instead of having to take difficult, painful treatments, the patient had only to swallow some pills...
...It had to be given in such large doses that the patients were sick, with violent headaches, blue lips and fingernails, and had to stay in the hospital while being treated...
...Penicillin is safe...
Vol. 9 • July 1945 • No. 31
