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Show A New Attack on TB The program recently announced by the National Tuberculosis Tuber-culosis Association to wipe out tuberculosis in the United States by locating every person suffering from the disease and treating him with appropriate medication should soon add still another one-time killer to the long list of drug eliminated ailments. As in the case of many other one-time killers, new medicines have made it possible for the medical profession to not only cut the death rate from tuberculosis, but to hope for its complete eradication as well. Since 1940,. new advances in medicine have helped cut the death rate from tuberculosis from 45.9 of every 100,000 Americans to only 7 per 100,000 in 1958. The steep drop in less than twenty years is due primarily to the development of streptomycin by Dr. Selman Waksman of Rutgers University, backed by a substantial grant from' a large pharamceutical manufacturer, isonazid, developed specifically for use in tuberculosis by American pharmaceutical manufacturers, manufactur-ers, and paraminosalicylic acid. These are the three drugs with which the National Tuberculosis Association plans to treat every tuberculosis sufferer in the United States, and thus eradicate the disease: for all time. : VJ , But 'tuberculosis is only one of many diseases which have responded in a similar fashion to new medicines. Such once dreadeddi$ease's)as typhoid fever diphtheria, mastoiditis,, polio, rheumatic fever, the venereal diseases and many others have lost their sting. (, Pneumonia and influenza take less than half the number of lives they took in 1940. Maternal deaths have drop- f t. ,- . ped from almost 40 per 10,000 live births in 1940 to 4 per 10,000 in 1958. . . J;; ;;"''; vr; ' ';'' , As these diseases have been defeated by, new medicines, others have come to take their place. But our hope for the future is that some day soon the American Cancer Society, the American Heart Association; or the National Committee Against Mental Illness may be able to report that it hopes to eradicate these diseases by tracking down every victim of their avages and treating treat-ing : them with such widely available products of the pharmaceutical pharma-ceutical industry as streptomycin and others. ':.'v' ,, i |
