Abstract
During the summers of 1931 and 1932 five strains of the Castellani-Sonne or Thjφtta type III dysentery bacilli were isolated at the Babies and Childrens Hospital from the stools of 5 children under 5 years of age. All the patients showed a typical course of dysentery infection. Among them one death occurred. It is emphasized here that increasing proof of the prevalence of this type of dysentery apparently is forthcoming. Especial attention should, therefore, be given to the isolation and identification of this type organism.
The organisms were minute, non-motile, gram negative rods, readily acidifying glucose, mannite, maltose, and rhamnose. Lactose was slowly acidified (one to 2 weeks) and the same was true for sucrose. Litmus milk was acidified by all strains and coagulated by 4 strains. Indole was not formed. In broth, marked sedimentation occurred, but there was no pellicle formation. The cultural characteristics of these 5 strains closely corresponded to those observed in 2 typical strains, No. 268 and Sonne B, obtained through the courtesy of Dr. S. A. Koser. Three out of 5 of our strains and the 2 Koser strains clotted milk in 21 days. The same basic reactions were described by Wiseman, 1 Fyfe, 2 Braun and Weil, 3 Koser, Reiter, Bortniker and Swingle, 4 and Soule and Heyman. 5 Rhein, 6 however, failed to find acidification of lactose but this may be accounted for on the basis of insufficient incubation time.
Polyvalent antidysentery sera failed to agglutinate the 5 strains. All agglutinations were performed by incubation in a water bath at 37°C. for 2 hours and overnight in an icebox at 4 to 5°C. The polyvalent sera also failed to agglutinate the new strains by the centrifuge method. It was then decided to immunize rabbits with these strains in order to determine their agglutinability in the presence of homologous sera.
Summary. Five strains of Castellani-Sonne dysentery bacilli were isolated at the Babies and Childrens Hospital during the summers of 1931 and 1932. The organisms, in so far as they were studied, were culturally and biochemically typical, but they were inagglutinable by their homologous antisera when agglutinations were performed in water baths at 37° and 56°C. and at ice box temperature overnight. However, by centrifugation of the suspension, 2 sera clumped all the 7 strains, while the third serum gave less marked clumping. Complement fixation gave excellent results, and doses of the sera as small as from 0.0001 to 0.0004 cc. fixed the complement in the presence of the strains. However, it is suggested that the centrifuge method of agglutination be used for routine diagnosis of this group of organisms on account of the slow appearance of the differentiating biological characters of the group and because of the relative inagglutinability of the strains by the usual method of agglutination.
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