"GLAURAMINE.”

Southland Times, Issue 19172, 16 February 1924, Page 6

"GLAURAMINE.”

MOST POWERFUL KILLER OF GERMS. A remarkable story, originating in experiments on the Western Front, lies behind the discovery of glauramine, the powerful germ-killer, which has been attracting the attention of hundreds of doctors at the London Medical Exhibition in Central Hall, Westminster. The new antiseptic is one of the fruits of five yeara’ research, work carried out by two young Lancashire chemists, Dr Arnold Renshaw and Mr 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, they tested it upon a Manchester victim of filariasis, an incurable tropical disease, in which tiny worms multiply in the blood and grow bigger and, bigger until death supervenes. Taking of the man’s blood, they tested it under the microscope with one drop of the yellow dye diluted four thousand times. In five minutes all the little wriggling worms were dead. Other microbes succumbed in 15 minutes under one drop of auramine diluted twenty thousand or even forty thousand times; and it is from auramine that they have obtained the new antiseptic, glauramine. The high state of dilution in which the preparation is being used for nose and ear surgery, for cleaning the skin prior to opefiitions, 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 dyestuffs.