Abstract
Bacteriologists and leprologists generally have regarded the facultative acid-fast organism cultivable from leprosy as a contaminant or a secondary invader of leprous lesions. Our filtration experiments with leprosy have been undertaken to exclude such adventitious organisms. Of 50 filtrates from rat leprosy through tested Seitz, Berkefeld N and W, and Chamberland L2 and L3 filters 16 gave positive cultures, while of 2 filtrates of human leprosy through Berkefeld N and W candles, the one through N gave a positive culture. These cultures from filtrates were in every case a pleomorphic and facultative acid-fast organism identical with the one cultivable directly from leprous lesions of the rat and man.
While it has been demonstrated by direct microscopic examination of centrifugal precipitates of filtrates that an occasional acid-fast bacillus, among the myriads present in a suspension of the organism, may pass through the pores of tested bacterial filters, 1 the probability of a chance contaminant or a microscopically unrecognizable secondary invader passing the filter in such a large proportion of the filtrates seems remote. Therefore, the repeated cultivation of this facultative acid-fast organism from filtrates of leprous tissues of the rat and man appear to furnish some support of the etiologic and endemiologic theories of leprosy advanced by us. 2
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