Abstract
The domestic fowl is subject to an infectious coryza, generally known as contagious catarrh, which under laboratory conditions remains localized in the nasal and orbital passages. In this respect it is unlike the coryza of laryngotracheitis, fowl pox, and fowl cholera from which there is commonly an extension of the etiological agent to other loci with the production of characteristic lesions.
Contagious catarrh was recently studied in Holland by deBlieck, 1 who isolated an organism resembling the B. influenzae of man from exudate streaked on an aerobic blood agar plate. Pure cultures of the bacterium when injected intranasally in normal fowl regularly produced a nasal discharge.
In the present investigation an uncomplicated coryza was initiated and subsequently maintained in a flock of disease-free birds by the intranasal injection, through the palatine cleft, of exudate originally obtained from naturally infected fowl. A nasal discharge, the only consistent symptom, generally appeared after an incubation period of 24-48 hours and continued, on the average, for 11 days.
The etiological agent of the coryza was not established by the injection either of bacteria isolated from aerobic plates or of exudate filtered through Berkefeld V and N candles. The bacteria were the usual mucous membrane inhabitants, among them several strains of a hemophilic bacillus similar to B. influenzae.
It was subsequently found, however, that the fluid from blood agar cultures of exudate which had been filtered through certain Berkefeld V candles contained a small, non-motile, Gram-negative bacillus apparently in a pure state. The organism grew sparsely in fluid blood at the base of slanted agar but failed to colonize on the slant or on the surface of aerobic blood agar plates. Colonization was later initiated by sealing the plates with modeling clay.
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