Drugs of Choice

Penicillin is an antibiotic for bacterial diseases, so it does make sense that it would be used to treat meningitis. Let me put it into context for you.


Who: Dr. Howard Florey and colleagues
What: began research on penicillin’s ability to cure bacterial diseases
When: 1939
Where: Oxford College, United States
Why: to find a cure for bacterial diseases

So basically, when penicillin was created it was considered a miracle drug of the 1940s.



This is how it works: "Penicillin kills bacteria by interfering with the ability to synthesize cell wall. In this sequence, Escherichia coli were incubated in penicillin for 30 minutes. The bacteria lengthen, but cannot divide. Eventually the weak cell wall ruptures (last panel)."
http://www.cellsalive.com/pen.htm
So in other words penicillin attacks the bacteria so that it can not multiply, and then it eventually explodes...makes sense.


Oily Chloramphenicol is antibiotic that is effective against bacteria. Is rarely prescribed for infections that can be treated with other antibiotics because of its toxicity.



Penicillin Vs. Oily Chloramphenicol

During the 1999 meningitis epidemic in Africa, 793 people were treated with antibiotics. Of these people, 143 of them were treated with penicillin and because of limited stock, the rest of the people were treated with a single dose of oily chloramphenicol.
Here are the Results: "Males were slightly more affected than females (1.3:1), mean age affected was 17.2 years, the majority being below 20 years of age (68%) while 27.3% were below 10 years. The peak of the epidemic was during late March and early April namely 9th and 10th epidemic weeks. In the penicillin group 87.1% recovered uneventfully, 6.4% died, 2.1% developed blindness and 1.5% partial deafness. In the chloramphenicol group, full recovery was reported in 92.8%, 5% fatalities, blindness in 0.5%, partial deafness in 0.3% and skin necrosis in 0.1%. So, obviously the oily chloramphenicol was a lot more efficient in curing the patients. It is easy to use, cheap, and safe, and will probably be to treat epidemics in the future, rather then penicillin."
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=12174228&dopt=Abstract

Here's what I think: Medicine is so much more complicated then anyone could ever imagine. Maybe, the oily chloramphenicol is better to treat people in Africa with, and penicillin is better for Americans. The whole antibiotics deal is very interesting to me, but thoes results that I found blew me away!

P.S. Since we are focusing on the meningitis belt in Africa, maybe our syringe should be of oily chloramphenicol.