Preliminary report on the use of chloramphenicol (Chloromycetin) in the treatment of acute gonorrheal urethritis

The great advances which have been made in recent years in the treatment of gonorrhea in-fections would appear to have provided the medi-cal profession with adequate therapeutic agents for this disease. The numerous advantages of penicil-lin treatment have resulted in its replacing the sulfonamide drugs, except in selected cases (1). Even the disadvantages of parenteral injections of penicillin have been avoided by a number of work-ers who have administered the antibiotic by mouth (1). Indeed, Campbell, Dougherty and Curtis reported on the oral use of penicillin in the prophy-laxis of gonorrhea at an earlier session of this Symposium (2). Despite the fact that penicillin has many attributes of an ideal drug for the treat-ment of gonorrhea, it has one distinct drawback, i.e., its suppressive effect on a coexisting syphilitic infection. This problem of the possible masking of syphilis by treating acute gonorrhea patients with-amounts of penicillin which are adequate for the bacterial infection but inadequate for the spirochetal infection is of tremendous importance (1, 3). Therefore, the search must continue for a drug with the activity of penicillin against the gonococcus but without its marked anti-spirochetal action. This report is a progress note which pre-sents certain preliminary data suggesting that chloramphenicol, or Chloromycetin,2 approaches penicillin in its efficacy in the treatment of acute gonorrheal urethritis in the male and that this new drug is distinctly less spirocheticidal than peni-cillin