Meningitis Antitoxin

Tests indicate that every other child is liable to an attack by cerebro-spinal meningitis. Currently only 174 cases are known to exist in the U. S. Last year at this time there were only 49 cases. But four years ago an epidemic flecked the nation with children dying stiff as boards. In extreme cases the disease bent the necks of victims so tensely that the backs of their heads lay between their shoulder blades.

In 1887 Dr. Anton Weichselbaum (1845-1920) of Vienna isolated the specific germ, meningococcus, which attacks the membranes covering the brain and spinal cord and causes the disease. Dr. Simon Flexner of the Rockefeller Institute perfected a serum which attacked the meningococci. That was in 1908. Mortality, which before 1908 had been 75%, is now 50%.

For the past 27 years the Flexner type of serum has been standard treatment for cerebro-spinal meningitis. The doctor sticks a hollow needle into the patient's rigid spine. Out squirts a quantity of the germ-laden cerebro-spinal fluid, which has been imprisoned under pressure. When the squirt slows down the doctor injects the serum.

Ten years ago Dr. Newell Simmons Ferry, whom Parke, Davis & Co. had hired from the University of Tennessee, began to hunt for a toxin which the meningococci might excrete. The epidemic of four years ago spurred him on, led him to develop an antitoxin in the blood of horses.

Last week Parke, Davis sent up a glad shout from Detroit that not only is Dr. Ferry's meningitis antitoxin a definite means of telling whether or not a child is susceptible to cerebro-spinal meningitis, but that in all probability three stiff doses will protect the child against the disease. Dr. Ferry, with the help of Dr. Arthur Harvey Steele and Dr. Robert Henry Haskell, proved his thesis on the students of the Wayne County Training School at Northville, Mich.

Match for Dr. Ferry's good news was Dr. Archibald L. Hoyne's good news from Chicago. Dr. Hoyne has been using intravenous injections of Dr. Ferry's antitoxin on active cases of meningitis in Cook County Hospital. Most cases responded promptly. Against the general 50% mortality rate, Dr. Hoyne last week presented a 25% mortality rate, due, said he, to the Ferry antitoxin.

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