Topic summary
Sulfa drugs
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Sulfonamide (medicine).
History
Sulfa drugs were shown to improve life expectancy in the years following their wide adoption. Because sulfa drugs were not effective against tuberculosis (TB), researchers could track the differences in mortality rates between conditions sulfa could treat and those it could not. A study of sulfa drugs—a major medical breakthrough in the 1930s—found they significantly reduced U.S. mortality rates for several infectious diseases. Between 1937 and 1943, sulfa drugs lowered maternal mortality by 25–40%, pneumonia mortality by 17–36%, and scarlet fever mortality by 52–67%. Overall, they reduced mortality by 2–4% and increased life expectancy by 0.4 to 0.8 years.