Word: tb
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From the sunbaked wastes of Arizona's Navajo Reservation came dramatic news about the new TB drug, isoniazid (TIME, March 3). The report was carefully evaluated in the gleaming tower of Manhattan's New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center. Then, last week, Cornell's Dr. Ralph Tompsett got up in London's cavernous, dingy Central Hall and passed the news to 400-odd experts gathered for a British Empire conference on TB. Sum of the findings: isoniazid is the only drug that belongs in the same class with streptomycin for effectiveness against tuberculosis. In most respects...
...great majority of cases, tuberculosis attacks the lungs. Isoniazid* was first given to such patients a year ago, and enthusiastic reports of good results broke out during the winter. But TB of the lungs is an unpredictable disease; of two patients with chest X rays which look alike, one may die quickly while the other gets better for no apparent reason. It might take years, and thousands of cases, to prove the value of a drug in these circumstances...
...covering of the brain and spinal cord, and miliary, in which they spread throughout the system. Untreated, both meningeal and miliary tuberculosis commonly kill within two or three months, and about one-third of the victims get only temporary help from streptomycin. To researchers, a patient with miliary TB is like a human test tube. The course of his disease is so predictable that they can tell just what a drug is doing...
...soon as they knew that isoniazid was safe, the Cornell researchers turned to the Navajos of Arizona to give it a thorough test. With their high susceptibility to TB and wretched living standards, the Indians provide a tragically large number of miliary and meningeal cases. Often, one patient has both forms. The Navajos were eager to help medical research fight the white man's disease which has killed more of them than white man's bullets ever did. Their Tribal Council put up $10,000 toward the project...
Hungry for the Bottle. The first Navajo to be treated with isoniazid was a seven-month-old baby girl named Patty. When her parents brought her to Dr. Charles M. Clark at Western Navajo Hospital in Tuba City, Patty was a wizened starveling of 9 lbs., with miliary TB. Her temperature was 103° and she had to be fed by tube. After 17 days of treatment with isoniazid, her temperature dropped to normal and she began taking the bottle hungrily. Now Patty weighs 16 lbs. and her TB seems to have been arrested...