The Treatment of Kala-Azar with Sodium Antimony-V-Gluconate: Preliminary Observations *The work reported in this paper was undertaken under the Endowment Fund of the Calcutta School of Tropical Medicine, aided by a grant from the Indian Research Fund Association.

A pentavalent antimony compound (Sdt. 561, solustibosan, antimony-v-hexonate, containing 20 mg. of antimony per c.cm. of solution) , that made a stable solution and could be given intramuscularly, was first introduced b) Prof. H. Schmidt, the pioneer worker on pent*1' valent antimony compounds. Kikuth and Schmidt (1938) found that this compound possessed a marked curative action in the le*,' maniasis of hamsters. Napier et al. (1937) firSj tried this drug in the treatment of ten cases o Indian kala-azar, with successful immediate re' suits. Ultimately it was considered that though the drug possessed considerable anti-kala-aza activity, it was less efficacious than the olde1 compounds of p-aminophenyl stibinic acid, e-9' neostibosail (Napier, 1943). After the outbreak of the World War II> a British equivalent of solustibosan, viz, sodium antimony-v-gluconate, was produced, and the drug was tested in a small series of cases oi kala-azar in 1942, with none too successful resuits. This led to a statement in the paper on the treatment of kala-azar with pentamidine M&B 800 (Napier and Sen Gupta, 1943); ' .... the drug (sodium antimony-v-gluconate) cannot be regarded as possessing anti-kala-azar activity comparable to neostibosan and urea stibamine . . . \ This statement Burke and Chakravarty (1944) criticized adversely in then report on treatment of 21 cases of kala-azar with this drug. The total dosage adopted by Burke and Chakravarty was 60 c.c. of the solution per 8 stone, i.e. 112 pound, body-weight. They reported that this was adequate to cure kalaazar in Assam and were quite effusive in then' praise of the drug, though they reported only the immediate results of treatment. Actually in this institution in 1942, a total of 9 cases, including the three cases referred to in the paper on pentamidine, had been treated with sodium antimony-v-gluconate. Of these 9 cases, there was marked improvement without permanent cure in 4 cases ; slight improvement in two cases ; the drug was quite ineffective in one case, and in two cases clinical recovery that