For Type III Pneumonia

Dr. Oswald Theodore Avery, Manhattan researcher of the famed Rockefeller Institute, will get the first $1,500 John Phillips Memorial Prize* when the American College of Physicians meets in San Francisco early next April. Thus he gets unusually prompt reward for reporting only last July what seems to be a specific remedy for the most deadly kind of lobar pneumonia. In lobar pneumonia one or more sections of a lung are infected. In bronchopneumoma, which is usually associated with other diseases like influenza, the infection is throughout the bronchi.

Usual cause of lobar pneumonia is a pneumococcus, of which there are 32 types. Of those most studied:

Type I causes one-third of these pneumonia cases, kills 25% to 30% of its victims. Young persons seem especially susceptible to this Type I. For this there is already a beneficial serum.

Type II causes one-fifth of the cases, also kills 30% of its victims.

Type III, which seems to have preference for elderly people, occurs in 10% to 15% of pneumonia cases. It kills 50% of its victims.

Types III and IV are usually present in the mouths of healthy people, become noxious under certain conditions of disability. For some reason doctors and nurses seldom contract pneumonia from their patients. But others may contract the disease in such numbers that an epidemic develops. Sunlight kills all types of pneumococci very rapidly (within iJ hours). In dark rooms the germs may live and infect for ten days.

A characteristic of all these pneumonia cells is that they are gum-coated. Their outer casings, or capsules, contain polysaccharides. Those gum-coatings are what make the germs virulent, deadly. Each type has its own peculiar coating. Without their coating the pneumonia germs are not very dangerous.

Dr. A very's triumph was to find an enzyme or ferment which has particular hunger for the coating of most deadly Type III. He had searched the country from coast to coast, had made hundreds of experiments. The necessary enzyme Dr. Avery and Rene Jules Dubos, Rockefeller bacteriologist trained by New Jersey's Microbiologist Selman Abraham Waksman, found in the cranberry bogs of New Jersey. (They found it in the muck of the bogs, not in the berries.) When the bog-bred enzyme and Type III pneumococci are mixed in a test tube, the pneumococci are skinned, like Samson lose their potency. The mixture Dr. Avery has injected into mice and rabbits, with no harm ensuing. An injection of the bog-ferment into animals apparently dying from Type III pneumonia cured them.

So far as could be learned last week Dr. Avery has not tried the ferment on human beings. But he has promised: "Its effect in patients suffering from Type III pneumonia will be determined after its action in animals has been very fully investigated."

* Dr. Phillips, a founder of Dr. George Washington Crile's Cleveland Cl--nic, died rescuing victims of the Clinic's great fire three years ago.

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