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Author: Admin | 2025-04-28
Isolated penicillin in a form that was fairly pure (by standards then current) and demonstrated its potency and relative lack of toxicity. By then World War II had begun, and techniques to facilitate commercial production were developed in the United States. By 1944 adequate amounts were available to meet the extraordinary needs of wartime. Antituberculous drugs While penicillin was the most useful and the safest antibiotic, it suffered from certain disadvantages. The most important of these was that it was not active against Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacillus of tuberculosis. However, in 1944 Selman Waksman, Albert Schatz, and Elizabeth Bugie announced the discovery of streptomycin from cultures of a soil organism, Streptomyces griseus, and stated that it was active against M. tuberculosis. Subsequent clinical trials amply confirmed this claim. Streptomycin, however, suffers from the great disadvantage that the tubercle bacillus tends to become resistant to it. Fortunately, other drugs became available to supplement it, the two most important being para-aminosalicylic acid (PAS) and isoniazid. With a combination of two or more of these preparations, the outlook in tuberculosis improved immeasurably. The disease was not conquered, but it was brought well under control. Other antibiotics Penicillin is not effective over the entire field of microorganisms pathogenic to humans. During the 1950s the search for antibiotics to fill this gap resulted in a steady stream of them, some with a much wider antibacterial range than penicillin (the so-called broad-spectrum antibiotics) and some capable of coping with those microorganisms that are inherently resistant to penicillin or that have developed resistance through exposure to penicillin. This tendency of microorganisms to develop resistance to penicillin at one time threatened to become almost as serious a problem as the development of resistance to streptomycin by the bacillus of tuberculosis. Fortunately, early appreciation of the problem by clinicians
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