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Updated: June 27, 2025
When it can be given only to the person who can muster from five to twenty-five dollars for each dose which he receives, it is evident that its usefulness is likely to be seriously restricted. The price of salvarsan before the war was $3.50 per full dose for the drug alone. It can be profitably marketed at less than $1.00 per dose.
In these cases, salvarsan and mercury, carefully given, seem not only not harmful to mother and child, but may entirely prevent the child's getting the disease. For this reason every maternity hospital or ward should be in a position to make good Wassermann blood tests, conduct expert examinations, and give thorough treatment to women who are found to have syphilis.
With the knowledge that the germ was related to certain other more familiar forms, Ehrlich set the trap for it that culminated in salvarsan, or "606," the powerful drug used in the modern treatment. By the finding of this same germ in the nervous system in locomotor ataxia and general paralysis of the insane, the last lingering doubt of their syphilitic character was dispelled.
Contagious Sores.+ Sexual indulgence, kissing, and other intimate contacts during the active stage of syphilis, as has been indicated, directly expose others to the risk of getting the disease. For that reason they should not be indulged in during the first two years of the average well-treated case receiving salvarsan and mercury by the most modern methods.
This is peculiarly so in syphilis. In the earliest days of the disease, while the infection is still local and the blood test negative, the prospects of radical cure are practically 100 per cent. This is the so-called abortive cure, the greatest gift which salvarsan has made to our power to fight syphilis. It depends on immediate recognition of the chancre and immediate and strenuous treatment.
Combining the use of mercury and salvarsan in accordance with the best modern standards, the actively contagious period as a whole can be reduced in average cases from a matter of years to one of a few weeks or months. Certainly, so far as recognizable dangerous sores are concerned, periodic examination, with salvarsan whenever necessary, would seem to dispose of much of the difficulty.
The second of these objects has been achieved by the researches of Ehrlich, who, in conjunction with his pupil, Hata, has built up a compound, the dihydrochloride of dioxydiamido-arseno-benzol, popularly known as salvarsan or "606." Other preparations, such as kharsivan, arseno-billon, and diarsenol, are chemically equivalent to salvarsan, containing from 27 to 31
If it is skilfully treated and kept at the breast, it is estimated that it has even as high as ninety chances in one hundred of surviving to a useful life. Salvarsan can be given to even very small babies, and mercury also is employed with excellent results.
+The Action of Salvarsan.+ It will be recalled that Ehrlich planned salvarsan to kill the germs of syphilis, just as quinin kills the germs of malaria. It was intended that when the drug entered the blood it should be carried to every part of the body, and fastening itself on the spirochetes, kill them without hurting the body.
Francis P. Garvan, who explains how, by refusing or neglecting to ship salvarsan, Germany wanted the United States "to starve to death" for lack of it, and he continues: "Think what an extension of disease and that an intensification of suffering and distress Germany was willing to impose upon her best market in order to obtain her imperial will."
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