The tuberculin reaction and anaphylaxis as studied by the Dale method

Abstract

It is natural that the various tuberculin reactions, as well as other specific phenomena of hypersensitiveness in bacterial disease, such as the mallein and typhoidin reactions should have been thought of from the beginning as probably anaphylactic in nature.

We do not think it suitable in this preliminary communication to go into the details of the controversial literature that has been waged for some time concerning this problem. Our studies are not completed, but as far as they go, they show sharp results in that we have checked up skin sensitiveness in tuberculous and experimentally sensitized animals with the state of general anaphylaxis as indicated by the uterine reaction observed by the Dale method.

The uterine method used in this way gives more conclusive results than any other because it avoids the uncertainties that always attend general anaphylactic experiments carried out on guinea pigs with bacterial extracts.

Our results so far may be summarized as follows:

Tuberculous animals, unless inoculated with overwhelming doses, always become anaphylactic to tuberculo-protein. Positive uterine reaction is never obtained, however, before the end of the third week, and sometimes not until the sixth week at a time when the disease has made considerable progress.

Skin reactiveness may develop in such pigs, however, as early as the ninth day, long before the uterus gives any signs of general anaphylaxis.

There may, thus, exist in the tuberculous animal marked skin reactivity without any uterine hypersensitiveness.

Both skin reactiveness and general anaphylactic hypersensitiveness may fade together in the prelethal stages when the pigs are very sick.

Normal guinea pigs are easily rendered anaphylactic to extracts of tubercle bacilli by injecting them intraperitoneally on successive or alternate days, for ten injections, and testing them on and after the eighteenth day after the last injection.