CONTROL OF VIRUS DISEASES 89 
4. Chemotherapy 
The great success of chemotherapy against bacterial diseases raised 
hopes that similar results would be forthcoming against virus infections 
but, unfortunately, this is apparently not the case. Just recently, 
however, encouraging results have been achieved with two new 
antibiotics against certain virus diseases. It may be significant, however, 
that these antibiotics appear to react only with the very large viruses, 
the rickettsiae, and not with the small viruses. Whether this indicates 
that the mode of reaction of the very small viruses, like those of yellow 
fever, poliomyelitis and foot-and-mouth disease, differs fundamentally 
from that of bacteria and the rickettsiae remains to be seen. 
Chloromycetin, the first of the two new antibiotics to be discovered, 
has been used with success against scrub-typhus and certain related 
infections. Aureomycin (trade name Duomycin) is the name given to 
the other antibiotic and it is a crystalline faintly golden yellow substance, 
a metabolic product of Streptomyces aureofaciens, a hitherto undescribed 
species of the actinomycetes. Although aureomycin has no apparent 
in vitro activity, it has marked therapeutic action against the viruses 
of psittacosis and the lymphogranuloma group and the rickettsiae 
of spotted fever, typhus fever, scrub-typhus fever and “Q” fever when 
grown on the chorio-allantoic membrane of the developing hen’s 
egg, and in mice and guinea-pigs. It gave no results with the viruses 
of influenza B, dog distemper, and the MEF-1 strain of poliomyelitis ° 
virus. 
Promising results were obtained in human patients suffering from 
Rocky Mountain spotted fever and fifteen “Q” fever patients were 
successfully treated by means of aureomycin, orally administered. 
An account of this work is given in a number of papers in the Ann. 
New York Acad. Sci., 51 (1948), pp. 175-342. 
Although the antibiotics tested so far against poliomyelitis have 
proved ineffective, some interesting results have been obtained in the 
chemotherapy of this virus in mice. It was found that pentnucleotide 
and yeast nucleic acid appeared to protect 90 per cent of mice exposed 
to the MM virus which produces a polio-like disease in these animals. 
Promising results on these lines have also been obtained with a 
human strain of polio virus in monkeys. In experiments in the 
Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia it has been found that the drug, 
oxythiamin, which is an analogue of thiamin and nitrous acid, 
induced a resistance to poliomyelitis in mice by producing a deficiency 
of vitamin B,. 
