GERM-KILLING GLAURAMINE

Evening Star, Issue 18532, 15 January 1924, Page 1

GERM-KILLING GLAURAMINE

A remarkable story, originating in ex pertinents on the western iront, lies behind the discovery of giauramine, the powerful germ-killer, which has been attracting the attention of hundreds of doctors ait the London Medical Exhibition in Central Hall, Westminster. The new antiseptic is one of 'the fruits of five years’ research work carried out by two young Lancashire chemists. Dr Arnold Renshaw and Sir Thomas H. Fairbrother, M.Sc., both of Manchester. The two young workers (says a correspondent of the ‘Scotsman’), realising that there was scope for the application of dyestuffs to the whole field of antiseptics, examined exhaustively the entire range of such dyes as could be applied to the work, and, their results have shown them which groups of dyes possess good antiseptic qualities and ■which do not. They made an almost dramatic discovery, for example, in regard to the yellow dye auramine. First, t they tested it upon a Manchester victim of filariasis, an incurable tropical disease, in which tiny worms multiply in the blood and grow bigger end bigger until death supervenes. Taking a drop of the man's blood, they tested it under the i microscope with one drop of the yellow j dye diluted four thousand times. In five minutes all the little wriggling worms were dead. Other microbes succumbed in fifteen minutes under one drop of auramino diluted twenty thousand, or even forty thousand, times; and it is from auramine that theyhave obtained the new antiseptic, giauramine. The Hgli state of dilution in which the preparat.on is being used for nose and ear surgery, for cleanimr f'he skin prior to operations, and otherwise, allows the stain left by the germ-killer to be readily removed. Its two discoverers are now busy pursuing their investigations into the properties of other dvestuffs.