Researches on the bacteriological diagnosis of cholera carried out by medical officers of the Sanitary, Maritime and Quarantine Council of Egypt / under the direction of Marc Armand Ruffer, President of the Council.

Date:
1907
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Researches on the bacteriological diagnosis of cholera carried out by medical officers of the Sanitary, Maritime and Quarantine Council of Egypt / under the direction of Marc Armand Ruffer, President of the Council. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    11/30 (page 9)
    Saturation test. — Bordet was the first to notice that an emulsion \ microbe added to the agglutinating serum of an animal previously >cted with the same microbe, absorbed most, if not all, of the specific ylutinins of the serum. The specific agglutinins of an immune )lera serum, for instance, are completely absorbed by adding >lera vibrios to the serum, whereas the non specific agglutinins nain free in the serum. In our experiments, ten loops of a cholera vibrio (CK), grown for hours on agar, were suspended in 10 ccs. of a 5 % solution of )lera serum (Berlin). After standing for two hours at the tempe- ure of the laboratory, the mixture was centrifugalised and the ar supernatant fluid decanted. The agglutinating power of the :anted liquid was now tested on all the vibrios which, in previous jeriments, had been agglutinated by the serum. As a control, the glutinating power of the same serum, not previously saturated th cholera microorganisms, was examined comparatively. The iult was that all the vibrios which agglutinated with cholera serum, lether isolated from cholera cases or not, absorbed the specific glutinins (See Table IV). Pfeiffer's reaction. — Owing to the number of microbes to be imined, it was impossible to try this reaction on guinea-pigs. The ormous number of animals which would have been necessary, and i fact that some vibrios were not virulent, made this experiment impossible one. Metchnikoff had noticed that if one drop of ritoneal lymph from a guinea pig (which had received either no svious injection, or merely one of bouillon) was added to vibrios spended in a little immune serum, a typical Pfeiffer's reaction took ice. Bordet used guinea pig's serum instead of peritoneal lymph. Three to four ccs. of bouillon were injected into the peritoneum an animal, and four hours afterwards the opaque liquid, full of icocytes, was withdrawn and left in the ice-box until the next day. ie cholera serum was prepared by injecting rabbits with vibrio CK. hen a trace of this peritoneal lymph was added to vibrios suspended serum (CK), the vibrios which reacted at all were almost completely msformed into granules. The microscopical appearance of these eparations therefore differed entirely from that of control pre-> rations. The main results are given in Table IV, which shows at all the vibrios agglutinated with cholera serum also reacted Pfeiffer’s test.