FOE TO GERMS

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 4, Issue 194, 17 December 1941, Page 2

FOE TO GERMS

POTENT NEW DRUG

EXTRACTS FKOM SOIL

Since the publication recently of a New York cablegram reporting extraordinary results in the healing of wounds and sores with a new drug named gramicidin, a confirmatory article in the British Medical Journal of August W has been found, containing further details of the discovery, which may prove of great importance in the present war and to medicine in general.

The cablegram stated that gramicidin, which was obtained from the soil in 1939 by Dr. Rene Duboise. of the Rockefeller l'nstitute for Medical Research, New York, was reported to be 1000 to 100,000 times more potent than drugs of the sulphaniiamide group, which in recent years have replaced serum treatment of many microbic diseases, notably pneumonia and eerebro-spinal fever. A, minute quantity of gramicidin was said to have protected a mouse from 10,00(1 fatal doses of pneumonia germs. War Between Bacteria "We seem to be at the beginning of a new antiseptic era, and not the least promising of the anti-bacter-ial agents are substances produced by bacteria themselves," states the English article, which refers to the discoverer of the. new drugs as "Dubos," not "Duboise." Although examples of antagonism between bacteria have been noticed for many rears," it continues, "the thorough investigation of this phenomenon was neglected until the work of Duboise, whose method and results wo described brielly net long ago. "Starting with a mixture of soils calculated to contain a great variety of bacteria, he fed it tor two years with nothing but a particular bacterium, thus selectively breeding out from the original flora those species which could attack and subsist on the .bacterium added as pabulum." Thus the experimenter isolated a bacillus which was highly antagonistic to many other bacteria. An extract of this organism, named gramicidin.-* proved to lie an antiseptic of extraordinary potency, and capable, for example, of curing "experimental pneumococcal infection in mice. Subsequently Dubos and a •colleague named Hotchkiss isolated another agent, tyrocidine, with different germicidal properties, from the same bacillus. The article discusses at greater length a research carried out recently at Oxford by a team of workers, under Professor H. "VV. riorey and Dr E. Chain with peneillin, a preparation from a mould which had been found to inhabit the growth of certain bacteria in its vicinity. The experiments proved that one part in 1,000,000 of peneillin had this effect on many varieties of bacteria under laboratory conditions. Tests on animals, however, were hindered by the difficulty of preparing enough of the drug in pure form. Change of Name Advice that the word rehabilitation in connection with patriotic appeals had been discarded, has been received. Administrators -of such funds will' in future be known as "welfare committees." Bulletin to be Issued It .has been decided that the National Headquarters of the Patriotic Council is to issue to the 11 Provincial Councils a concise monthly bulletin summarising the Overseas and New Zealand Activities of the Fund Board, in so far as they affect the provision of comforts, amenities and recreational facilities for all branches of the Fighting Services and including progress reports of the operations of the New Zealand Forces Club at Cairo and in London.

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