SEARCH FOR DRUG TO CURE PNEUMONIA

Dominion, Volume 32, Issue 154, 25 March 1939, Page 6 (Supplement)

SEARCH FOR DRUG TO CURE PNEUMONIA

Scientist’s Success At His 693rd Attempt

Holding up a test-tube to the light of a laboratory window overlooking Hie Thames at Dagenham, white-hairei] Dr. Arthur J. Ewins murmured :• "TliiS is the 693rd attempt—l wonder if this is tlie one?” • \

In the test-tube was a white powder, the product of months of precise and painstaking experiment. Though he did not know it, the doctor's task was ended. He bad perfected a compound which today is saving the lives of hundreds of victims of lobar pneumonia.

Thus was born, through the skill of an unknown doctor of science, the drug which was named "M. and B. 093” —the product of the C93rd experiment in the laboratory of Messrs. May and Baker. Ifor more than three years Dr. Ewins had concentrated on this task. Every day be knew (hut pneumonia was claiming scores of victims, and that he had still to find the elusive formula which meant death to the germ. But the work could not bo hurried —

desperate though the need might be. He had a B a basis a drug, sulphanilamide, which had already proved successful in cases of puerperal fever, erysipelas, and septicaemia. His task was to discover whether it could not, in another chemical form, destroy the pneumonia germ. Dr. Lionel E. 11. Whitby, of the Middlesex Hospital, injected into a mouse enough pneumonia germs to kill 10 000 mice. Then he gave the mouse a dose of M. and B. 093. Miraculously, the mouse lived. Then it was tried with patients at Dudley Road Hospital, Birmingham, where it snatched back from death men and women whose lives yere despaired of. > The drug was a proved success. Pneumonia, responsible for nearly 30.000 deaths in Britain every year, was conquered. Today every British hospital treating lobar pneumonia is using M. and B. 093. To save the Life of a patient costs only about 15/-.