New Use for Thalidomide?

For 19 months, the 44-year-old leprosy patient lay in Jerusalem's Rothschild Hadassah University Hospital, plagued with insomnia and skin eruptions, muscle and joint pains, and high fever--the devilish collection of leprosy-caused symptoms known as lepra reaction. In a last-ditch effort to ease his pain and that of five similarly afflicted patients, Israeli Dermatologists Felix Sagher and Jakob Sheskin decided last November to try an unorthodox remedy: thalidomide.

It was no secret that the drug was an effective tranquilizer, but it had been withdrawn from the market after thousands of pregnant women who used it delivered malformed babies. "To our surprise," reported Dr. Sheskin in Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics, "there was rapid subjective and objective improvement." Within eight to 48 hours, pain eased, skin lesions disappeared, and temperature returned to normal. Since then, a score of leprosy patients have been given thalidomide daily, with equally encouraging results.

Leprosy is far from a major health problem in Israel, but there are at least 12 million cases in remote tropical and subtropical areas of the world. And though thalidomide, thus far, has been used solely to reverse the dangerous lepra reaction, the Israeli doctors are continuing the dosage to see if it has any effect on the disease itself. Thalidomide's producer, Chemie Gruenenthal of Germany, is watching the Israeli experiments closely to see if the controversial drug might yet have a useful application.

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