Medicine: Drug Notes, Oct. 8, 1945

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New & old drugs made news last week:

¶ "Periston," a German-concocted synthetic chemical, was mixed with water and used by the Nazis as a blood plasma substitute. Periston resembles gelatin and gum acacia (sometimes used for the same purpose) but is safer than either — so say the Germans, who gave more than 200,000 treatments "with practically no reactions."

¶ Penicillin can be given in ice cream. Doctors at the San Diego Naval Training Center, treating sore throat, scarlet fever and trench mouth, stir penicillin into soft ice cream, put the mixture in paper cups and refreeze it in a refrigerator tray. The ice cream preserves the drug, disguises its bitter taste, and slips easily down babies and other difficult patients.

¶ Boric acid, the old home remedy stand by, got some hard words in the Journal of the American Medical Association. It can be fatal when it gets into a baby's for mula by mistake and, says Dr. E. H. Watson of Ann Arbor, Mich.: "As a lavage to remove pus from the eye, a weak solution of sodium bicarbonate is much more effective." His advice: throw that boric acid out of the medicine cabinet.

¶ Colchicine — an extract of the autumn crocus, useful in gout — has been tried in some half-dozen cases of leukemia, the dread blood disease. No one has been saved from leukemia by colchicine, which slows down the division of living cells, but Dr. W. Harding Kneedler of Philadelphia thinks that colchicine helps and that "further trial . . . seems justified."