BLACK FEVER

Wairarapa Times-Age, 14 April 1942, Page 4

BLACK FEVER

NEW DRUG DISCOVERED. Thousands of children will be saved from a lingering death by black fever as the result of the discovery of a new drug, diamidinci stilbene, or M. & B. 744, by British research chemists. Black fever is prevalent on the southern and eastern coasts of the Mediterranean, in Morocco, Turkey, Yugoslavia, Palestine, the Sudan and even as far afield as India, Malaya and South America. Most of its victims are children between the ages of one and three, and in some areas as many as 8 in 10 of them die.

The new drug, which is injected into the veins, gives better results with a fiftieth of the dose of other remedies, at one tenth of the cost and in a fifth of the time. One of the first cures, a Hindu seaman from Calcutta, aged 26, was able to leave hospital six weeks after he had been given 400mgms. in 8 daily doses. In another case, after Sudanese natives had been treated at Khartoum, the medical officer reported that they “had been clamouring for their discharge from hospital, and in fact had used it only as a sleeping place from which they issued daily on a round of revelry and generally beating the place up.” . The doctor added, “while I personally pay more attention to weight records, blood counts and spleen punctures, the fact that these patients, were able to behave in this fashion -is regarded locally as convincing evidence that they have been very effectively restored to health and strength.”