TUBERCULOSIS TREATMENT

Evening Star, Issue 19272, 10 June 1926, Page 5

TUBERCULOSIS TREATMENT

DR SMALPAGE'S SERUM UNFAVORABLE REPORTS. Press Association—By Telegraph—Copyright Australian and N.Z. Press Association, MELBOURNE, June 9. In the House of Representatives Sir Neville Howse announced that interim reports on Dr Smalpage’s anti-tuber-culosis treatment had been received from five States. The reports generally were unfavorable, and spoke of aggravated symptoms resulting from the use of the serum. Not one report expressed the opinion that the patients had materially benefited from the treatment. LABORATORY EXPERIMENTS. MELBOURNE, June 10. (Received June 10, at 10. So a.m.) In the House of Representatives, speaking on t-he Smalpage antituberculosis treatment, Sir Neville Howse said that the Commonwealth Laboratory experiments showed that the disintegration and fragmentation of tubercle bacilli did not occur after treatment with splenic extract, that there was no evidence of an analytic principle in the splenic extract, and that when guinea pigs artificially infected with human tubercle bacilli were divided into two groups, one group being treated, the other group kept as controls, in which the disease was allowed to develop normally, almost all the treated animals died, the control animals were still alive. Some rabbits, infected with bovine tubercle bacilli, were similarly divided into two groups. Some were treated by different methods approved by Hr Smalpage and others were kept as (controls. Tile treated animals died more rapidly than the controls. The acting-director of the laboratory, in his summary, said that the results indicated that neither the scrum nor the extract had been of the slightest avail in saving the lives of guinea pigs infected with human tubercle bacilli. On the other hand they indicated that death had been hastened by the use oi these agents.