MENINGITIS CURED

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 84, 6 October 1938, Page 5

MENINGITIS CURED

SUCCESS OF NEW DRUG

A seven-year-old Wolverhampton girl stricken with pneumococcal meningitis, a disease from which few recover, has been cured by a new drug, says the "Manchester Guardian." Doctors had been waiting for. such a case following Dr. L. E. H. Whitby's disclosure earlier in the year of the protection afforded to mice against experimental pneumococcal infection by a drug of the sulphanilamide group technically known for. short as "M and B 693." The results of Dr. Whitby's experiments carried such conviction that the manufacturers of the drug were asked fbr a trial supply for use as soon as possible in a proven case of pneumococcal meningitis. Soon afterwards —on July 13—the little girl was admitted to the Royal Hospital, Wolverhampton, desperately ill, and treatment begun with M and B 693. After eleven days the child was well on the road to recovery, and the drug dosage was discontinued. In the I middle of August she left hospital in perfect health. Commenting on this case in the "Lancet," Dr. S. C. Dyke, director of the pathological department of the hospital, describes the response as dramatic and as leaving little room for doubt as to the drug's efficacy. "From the evidence of the temperature chart," he says, "it would appear, that infection had been successfully combated by the end of twelve hours from the beginning of treatment. Pneumococcal meningitis is not an uncommon condition, and until the introduction of the drugs of the sulphanilamide group its mortality has been little short of 100 per cent." Dr. Dyke also outlines the treatment with this drug of a 61-year-old woman patient infected with pneumococcal septicaemia. "Although the diagnosis of this usually carries with it a grave though not hopeless prognosis and the prospect of dangerous, severe, and probably proti-acted illness, in the case of this patient all symptoms promptly subsided. Progress has since been uneventful, and convalescence is now wellj established," he adds,