Abstract
It has been shown that sulfanilamide has a slight therapeutic effect in the treatment of experimental staphylococcal infections in mice. 1 , 2 , 3 However, its efficacy has not been great and the drug has been of little value in the treatment of staphylococcal infections in man, in which the tissues or blood stream have been seriously invaded by these organisms. Recently Whitby 4 without giving details of his experiments has shown that sulfapyridine has a definite chemotherapeutic effect in experimental staphylococcal infections in mice.
We have been testing the comparative therapeutic effects of sulfapyridine and sulfanilamide in experimental staphylococcus aureus infections produced in mice by the intravenous injections of varying numbers of organisms. The technic of producing such infections and the time and method of treatment have been described previously by us. 3
It is to be noted that in each experiment, the untreated control mice were dead by the sixth day, and at the end of the first week of treatment 73.5% of those mice treated with sulfapyridine were still alive while only 34% of the mice treated with sulfanilamide were surviving. At the end of the second week (4 days after the termination of therapy) 32.6% of the mice treated with sulfapyridine were alive while only 8% of those treated with sulfanilamide were living. The surviving mice are being held for an indefinite period, to determine their eventual fate.
It seems from these results, that the chemotherapeutic effect of sulfapyridine in staphylococcal infections in mice is definite enough to warrant careful clinical trials of the drug in severe staphylococcal infections. We are conducting such trials and to date we have noted dramatic clinical results in 2 patients suffering from severe staphylococcal sepsis.
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