Home Treatment for Syphilis

Syphilis is a conquered disease in one sense only--that the chemical means to obliterate it are on hand. Its real conquest is a problem of lining up the patients. Standard syphilis-destroyer is arsphenamine, the drug salvarsan ("606") which Germany's Paul Ehrlich concocted 30 years ago. Mercury and bismuth compounds are also useful. But all these drugs must be injected regularly over a long period (18 months to two years) and many patients heartily dislike injections and monotonous visits to the doctor. When their gross symptoms disappear, they often abandon treatment forthwith, still harboring the pale lurking spirochetes.

A sensational new drip treatment which enables patients to assimilate massive doses of arsenicals a drop at a time through their veins (TIME, April 22) provides a quick cure of early syphilis in some cases. But a patient must cooperate by staying in a hospital five days. Doctors have long wanted a syphilis treatment which could be taken (according to their instructions) by mouth, at home. Now they have it.

The preventive value of bismuth for syphilis was made clear in the 1920s by Dr. M. E. Sonnenberg of Poland, who gave bismuth injections to prostitutes for five years, obtained 95% protection. For the past ten years, fierce Dr. Paul John Hanzlik and his co-workers at Stanford University have been working to put bismuth into practical anti-syphilis pills. Recently they settled on a soluble sodium bismuthate compound which they called "sobisminol." Last week in the American Journal of Syphilis, Gonorrhea and Venereal Diseases they were able to publish an impressive summary of results.

In most patients, two capsules of sobisminol taken with a glass of water three times a day for several weeks healed the surface disturbances and freed them of spirochetes. It also passed into the blood stream and attacked the spirochetes in the blood and tissues. Sobisminol also works as a prophylactic. Taken daily for at least three weeks, it protects against syphilitic infection after the first week. But Dr. Hanzlik does not promise complete cures on the basis of sobisminol alone. He and other investigators believe its role for the present is to shorten and minimize the course of injections.

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