SLEEPY SICKNESS.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 5091, 21 February 1927, Page 3

SLEEPY SICKNESS.

REMEDIES FOR THE DISEASE.

SATISFACTORY TRIALS REPORTED

Among all the remarkable new methods, of treating disease which have amde their appearance in the last 29 years, none is more curious than that which consists in giving a patient suffering from one ailment another wherewith to cure him (writes a scientific correspondent of the Daily Chronicle). In one disease, general paralysis, this new method has already been proved strikingly successful. It'is now being applied to another, encephalitis lethargica—sleepy sickness,, as it is popularly called —which his hitherto proved one of the most obstinate scourges with which medical science and research have had to deal.

If, as there is some reason to suppose, a sufferer from encephalitis can be given a mild and ultimately Quite harmless attack of recurring fever, and the gravely harmful'and dangerous encephalitis infection is thereby either greatly reduced or entirely cured, this “desperate” remedy will, indeed, have proved of inestimable value.

One of the fhost puzzling features of encephalitis is its serious aftereffect on the patient. Apparently the disease causes damage to the brain, which, even after outward recovery, sometimes reveals itself in an extraordinary lowered moral standard, as well as in other ways.

This is particularly true j and especially tragic, in the case of children, among whom the epidemic has been severe in many European countries, Including England and Scandinavia, countries in which enormous suras are spent on the education of the young, and in which their moral standards are normally excellent. Hitherto, although it gradually became obvious that such children would want a long after-treatment, extending in severe cases, into years, nothing much could be done to hasten the cure.

The new mtehod of inoculation with recurring fever has already been tried in Sweden, and, jfe,rticulariy in early cases, is said to have been satisfactorily successful No one person will be .able to claim the laurels for this particular discovery if it proves as successful as is hoped, though Wagner Wn Jauregg, the Austrian scientist, who first endeavoured to cure general paralysis by means of infection with malaria, and who thus brought this method into medical practice, perhaps deserves the greatest credit. Von Jauregg noticed that patients, suffering from this terrible malady, for whom previously almost nothing could be done, appeared to improve after accidental attacks of pneumonia and other illnesses. He experimented as long ago as 1887 by injecting tuberculin, and later used hypodermic injections of typhus vaccine. Finally he ehose malaria because it can be readily controlled by quinine treatment. The theory on which this work is based is that the artificially givendisease stimulates the body cells to produce substances which kill the spirochaetes, the germs which are responsible 'for general paralysis. As everyone knows, malaria itself ‘S amenable tci quinine treatment. A synthetic drug, called plasmochin, which, may largely replace quinine in future clinical use, has just been made in Germany. A special compound of, this drug has been prepared as a counter-cure for the type of malaria injected into sufferers from general paralysis.