Word: streptomycin
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...Crofton, along with a team of doctors at London's Brompton Hospital, who finally answered the question in 1950. In a 15-month trial involving 107 patients, the physicians showed that streptomycin curbed the number of deaths from TB. That success was short-lived: the TB bacilli quickly became resistant to the drug, blossoming into raging infections. Crofton, however, had the insight to combine streptomycin with another new antibiotic--a formula that was to become the blueprint for combination therapy. That approach still forms the cornerstone of TB treatment and served as the inspiration for similar multipronged attacks on serious...
...World War II. By 1946, TB was a leading cause of death among adults in Europe and North America, festering in the close quarters of military barracks and shelters accommodating displaced communities. There was no treatment other than rest and fresh air. An American scientist had purified an antibiotic, streptomycin, that raised hopes by showing a remarkable ability to kill tuberculosis bacteria in a lab dish. But nobody knew whether the compound would prove effective--or safe--in human patients...
...would say that most of the American public believe that bacterial infections were conquered with the discovery of penicillin and streptomycin and that the dawn of the antibiotic age meant the end of bacterial infection as an important threat," says Richard Ebright, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at Rutgers and a co-author on the study...
...THEY WORK? Cipro is the only drug approved for biological attacks--specifically for inhaled anthrax--although it's never been directly tested in humans. Doxycycline and penicillin may help as well, if given over a long term. Streptomycin or gentamicin are preferred for plague, but tetracyclines and fluoroquinolones also do the trick. For tularemia, doxycycline and ciprofloxacin are the antibiotics of choice. Prompt treatment is essential...
...resistant TB could not have been gloomier. The last major anti-TB drug, rifampin, was approved more than a quarter-century ago. In the interim, the TB bacillus has managed to develop resistance to the cocktail of drugs physicians have long used to treat it, including that old standby streptomycin. New drugs, with different mechanisms of action, would be a great help, particularly if they shortened the present six months' time required for treatment. The linezolid family, for example, appears to hold some promise, as does a compound the Seattle-based PathoGenesis Corp. is investigating...