British anti-lewisite as an antidote for acute mercury poisoning

In another paper of this series (Thompson & Whit- taker, 1947) a review is given of the application of BAL to the treatment of intoxication by metals other than arsenic.Using the brain pyruvate enzyme as a test system these authors showed that in vitro BAL was able to protect against the toxic action ofcompounds ofantimony, gold and mercury.Concurrently with this work experiments were carried out to determine whether BAL was also effective in vivo as an antidote to injected or orally administered mercuric chloride.Many authors (Rosenthal, 1933, 1934; Wolpaw & Alpers, 1942; Rozhkov & Arkhipov, 1939; Barnes, 1939; Hug, 1938) have claimed that rongalite (sodium formaldehyde sulphoxylate) is an effective antidote for mercuric chloride poisoning.On the other hand, Modell, Gold, Winthrop & Foot (1937) reviewing the evidence in conjunction with their own experimental results came to the conclusion that 'while sulphoxylate may prove of some clinical value in reducing the mortality in bichloride of mercury poisoning, the problem of controlling the chief cause of the high mortality in human poisoning remains unsolved'.They found that when the mer- cury and the antidote were given orally to cats no appreciable protection was afforded when the delay in treatment was longer than 15 min.Munoz (1935) working with rats found very little protection after 5 min.In view of this doubtful value of rongalite