Abstract
The investigations of Netter and Levaditi, 1 Anderson and Frost, 2 Peabody, Draper and Dochez, 3 and of Römer 4 among others indicate that the sera of persons who have recovered from an attack of poliomyelitis have the power to neutralize the virus of this disease. Netter and Levaditi 5 and Taylor 6 have shown that sera from this group of persons do not always possess this neutralizing power, however.
The work of Anderson and Frost 2 and of Peabody, Draper and Dochez 3 and of Leake 7 indicates that sera from suspected “abortive” cases of poliomyelitis are not certain in their action against the virus.
These 3 latter groups of observers have reported experiments in which sera of normal persons have sometimes neutralized the virus, although usually they did not.
None of these investigators except Anderson and Frost, 2 who apparently nullified their results by the addition of “normal” human serum to activate the serum-virus mixtures, attempted to study these reactions in a quantitative manner.
In the experiments reported here Berkefeld filtrates of 5% emulsion of spinal cord containing the virus were mixed in 1.5 cc. quantities with an equal quantity of the serum dilutions studied. The resulting mixture was placed in the incubator at 37°C. for 2 hours and then in the ice box for 18 to 20 hours. Two cc. amounts of the mixture were injected into monkeys by the intra-cerebral route. The experiments were planned so that they were controlled by the presence of convalescent sera from monkeys or persons which were expected to neutralize and by sera from infants or normal monkeys not expected to inactivate.
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