In this article I am calling attention to what appears to me to be unappreciated ill-effects of animal sera.
Dr. L. J. Witts warning regarding the danger of anaphylaxis brings me to the next sub-division.
THE DANGER OF ANAPHYLAXIS.
(2) (b) This is a possibility with which medical practitioners seem peculiarly unfamiliar; otherwise one would have been tempted to believe that the importance and universality of this phenomenon had been deliberately and wantonly ignored in the interest of, and under the powerful though subtle influence of, the profit making manufacturers. (I have shown elsewhere that one horse purchased for, say, ten pounds, will in nine years produce serum of which the retail value is in the neighborhood of L48,000.).
In using the word “universality” I mean to indicate that every single person injected becomes sensitized in more or less degree, no matter what serum has been employed; and that this condition may be manifested at any time thereafter in that persons life if a serum of any type derived from the same species of animal injected for a subsequent illness. Moreover, no one can foretell the likelihood of a severe reaction occurring in any particular individual.
When one realizes the horrible and sometimes fatal nature of these reactions (presently to be described) the warning against the indiscriminate use of sera in inappropriate cases will be seen to have especial force. Let me again remind the reader of the advice, constantly offered to the practitioner by Medical Officers of Health and others, of which the following is a typical example. Writing in the British Medical Journal (July 22nd, 1933), Dr. L. Cobbett exhorts: “Let the doctor never wait for the saw [throat], but give antitoxin with the least possible delay . . .”.
