MICROBE PILLS

Southland Times, Issue 19523, 24 May 1922, Page 3

MICROBE PILLS

NEW DISCOVERY IN PARIS. Every soldier who served in the war tains vivid memories of the various inoculations, vaccinations, and subcutaneous injections he had to undergo. He will remember also the discomfort and pain he not infrequently suffered. But subcutaneous injection had established itself as the one reliable method of infectious and, in spite of its numerous attendant disadvantages seemed destined to hold the field. The Pasteur Institute, however, for all that it came into being as one of the high temples of subcutaneous injection, and has been the main source of supply of serums to the laboratories of the world for the last two generations, has of late years been seeking for newer prophylactics. Typhoid, now rampant throughout Russia and Poland, has become a menace to the health of the world. The only satisfactory check it was possible to impose was that of subcutaneous injection, involving the dangers of inoculation to even more serious diseases—as has been found to be the case when experiments have been made with various vaccines. Even when these risks were run it has not been possible to guarantee immunity, since in several instances even the inoculated would succumb to attacks of typhoid in fresh epidemics. The immunity w’as temporary, not permanent. EATING MICROBES. In the early searches for a new treatment experiments were made with the Lumiere process of inoculation by absorption, the mouth-cousumption of dead microbes. But the success of this treatment has not been proved by experiment. So the Pasteur people have tried again. They were not satisfied that the intestinal wall, the first to be attacked by such diseases as typhoid, pare-typhoid, and dysentery, could be made sensitive enough to fortify itself to impregnability by the absorption of dead microbes alone. These dead microbes must be digested if they were to become efficacious. Accordingly, Professor Besredka, of the Pasteur institute, devoted himself to further research. Convinced that the Institute had got on to the right track, he began a long series of experiments with the object of discovering some means of making the dead microbe pills digestible, and finally succeeded by rendering them soluble with an admixture of ox-gall. His discoveries were first put to the test in a typhoid-ridden district in Russia, where he was able to secure practical immunity for everyone who swallowed six of his pills, two at a time, before TYPHOID TEST. Such was the report. But Russia was far away, and the Pasteur people hesitated to endorse the Professor, until the recent outbreak of typhoid in the Pas-de-Calais enabled them to submit the new treatment to a thoroughly exhaustive test. Two thousand and nine people exposed to the risks of contagion were selected. Of these 1236 were submitted to the Beshedka test, 73 to the subcutaneous treatment, while 600 refused treatment. Out of those treated by the Besredka process only one contracted the disease, and that in the mildest form. Of the 173 subcutaneously treated, four succumbed, while of the non-treated, 22 succpmbed. As a result of this test the Paris Academy of Medicine has authorised the employment throughout France of the new Besredka method. These results suggest that Besredka pills are deserving of analysis in all British laboratories (says a London paper). And not only these pills, but two other recent anti-disease discoveries of the Pasteur Institute. One of these, also a find of Professor Bedreska, is a tuberculous egg-pre-pared antigin, to be taken in tablet form, both as a preventive and as a remedy; the other is in the form of dentifrice, and is advocated both as a preventive and as a cure for pyorrhoea, hitherto generally regarded as more or less incurable.