Treatment of male gonorrhoea with a chlortetracycline-sulphonamide combination.

It is believed that there are many practitioners and public health officers who would now employ a reasonably efficient oral therapy in gonorrhoea in preference to penicillin by injection, even though penicillin rates highly on the score of cost. It may well be that after 10 years the chance of an untoward penicillin reaction will become much greater, even in places where such reactions are now few. The justification for oral therapy is possibly greater in under-developed countries. In choosing antibiotics for the oral therapy of gonorrhoea, there should be a wide safety margin to allow for overdosage occasioned by misguided efforts at self-treatment, or from frequently repeated courses of the drug consequent on multiple reinfection. Home (1950) found in Edinburgh that it was important for the success of oral therapy in the clinic to prescribe not more than two doses of the medicament, for clinic patients could very seldom be trusted to take more than the one dose at the stipulated time-interval. Thomson (1956), using tablets of aureomycin-triple sulpha claimed a 91L3 per cent. cure rate with two doses each of four tablets. Although the new oral penicillins are stated to be effective in the treatment of gonorrhoea, there is a tendency to avoid penicillin if other satisfactory oral therapy is available because of the reported rise in the incidence of penicillin reactions. The safety of aureomycin over a long term is generally acknowledged. The sulphonamide used is sulphamethoxypyridazine (Lederkyn) in 0 5-g. tablets.