"Madame Penicillin", which saved thousands of lives during the Second World War

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Today we will talk about the quiet feat of the biologist Zinaida Ermolyeva. She was the first in the USSR to develop penicillin, which saved thousands of lives during the Great Patriotic War, and was able to stop the spread of cholera in the conditions of besieged Stalingrad.

A dangerous experiment

Zinaida Ermolyeva, like no one else, knew how to defeat cholera. The desire to find a cure for this terrible disease prompted her to become a doctor. While still a student, she got up early at dawn and made her way through the window to the laboratory in order to give an extra couple of hours to the experiments.

Zinaida devoted a lot of time to the study of cholera. She knew how insidious this acute intestinal infection was. It always proceeds with severe diarrhea, vomiting, which leads to dehydration. It spreads, as a rule, in the form of epidemics. Infection occurs mainly when drinking non-disinfected water. The infection affects both children and adults and, if left untreated, can lead to death within a few hours.

In 1922, a cholera outbreak engulfed Rostov-on-Don. Then the dirty waters of the Don and Temernik became the reason. Ermolyeva, a 24-year-old graduate of the Faculty of Medicine, decided on a dangerous experiment. After neutralizing the gastric juice with soda, she took 1.5 billion microbial bodies of cholera-like vibrios and studied the clinical picture of the classic cholera disease on herself.

The result obtained made it possible to quickly diagnose the disease and formed the basis for the sanitary standards for water chlorination, which are still used today.

Infected Stalingrad

In 1942, the fascist invaders attempted to infect the water supply of Stalingrad with Vibrio cholerae,”said the head of the Department of Microbiology and Virology No. 2 of the Rostov Medical University, Doctor of Medical Sciences, Professor Galina Kharseyeva to the Devichiy-Spetsnaz.rf portal. - A troop consisting of epidemiologists and microbiologists headed by Zinaida Vissarionovna Ermolyeva was urgently sent there. In bottles with them, they carried bacteriophages - viruses that infect the cells of the causative agent of cholera. Echelon Ermolyeva came under bombardment. Many medicines were destroyed

The Nazis hoped by infecting the inhabitants of Stalingrad with cholera with the least effort to deal with the civilian population and spread the infection along the evacuation routes further.

For six months Zinaida Ermolyeva was in the front line. Despite the fact that the anti-cholera serum brought with her was clearly not enough, she managed to organize the most complex microbiological production in the basement of one of the buildings of the city besieged by the Germans.

Every day, almost 50 thousand people took a vital medicine, which has never happened in history. All wells were chlorinated in the city, mass vaccinations were organized, and the epidemic was stopped.

Madame Penicillin

Working in Stalingrad, Zinaida Vissarionovna closely watched the wounded soldiers. Most of them died after operations due to purulent-septic complications. It was difficult for Yermolyeva to realize that soldiers were painfully dying in hospitals from blood poisoning, while in the West they were already using the miraculous drug - penicillin. The allies refused to sell the license to manufacture the medicine even for very large sums of money. And the technology for its production was kept in the strictest confidence.

Yermolyeva took up the creation of a domestic analogue. The fungus necessary for the production of the medicine was sought everywhere - in the grass, on the ground, even in bomb shelters. From the collected samples, the laboratory staff isolated fungal cultures and tested their effect on pathogenic staphylococcus bacteria, which die upon contact with an antibiotic.

In just a few months, Zinaida Ermolyeva was able to create a drug similar to the imported one. It was named "Krustozin". Head of the Department of Microbiology and Virology No. 2 of the Rostov Medical University, Doctor of Medical Sciences, Professor Galina Kharseeva told the portal Devichiy-spetsnaz.rf about the first successful use of this drug.

One of the first to be cured with this drug was a Red Army soldier wounded in the shin with bone damage, who developed sepsis after amputation of the thigh. Already on the sixth day of using penicillin, the condition of the hopeless patient improved significantly, and the blood cultures became sterile, which testified to the victory over the infection

In 1943, the USSR launched the mass production of the first domestic antibiotic. The drug created by Ermolyeva helped to save millions of lives in the future. Thanks to him, the death rate from wounds and infections in the army decreased by 80%, and the number of amputations of limbs by 20-30%, which allowed more soldiers to avoid disability and return to duty to continue their service.

At the end of the 1940s, foreign scientists, having studied "Krustozin", came to the conclusion that in its effectiveness it was superior to overseas penicillin. As a sign of their respect, overseas colleagues called Zinaida Ermolyeva "Madame Penicillin".

In 1943, Zinaida Ermolyeva was awarded the Stalin Prize. She gave the money to the needs of the front, and a few months later a fighter with the inscription "Zinaida Yermolyeva" on board entered the battle with the Nazis.

She was a modest woman who did not stick out her merits to the country, she did not attach any importance to the invaluable contribution she personally made to the Victory.