FURTHER STUDIES ON BACTERIAL ALLERGY THE ANTIGEN INVOLVED IN PNEUMOCOCCUS ALLERGY

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
It has been difficult to produce severe allergy with bacterial substances other than tubercle bacilli, and the writers have endeavored for some years to elucidate the mechanism of bacterial allergy generally by experiments on guinea pigs and rabbits, with other organisms. While it is relatively easy to obtain moderate allergic reactions by sensitizing animals with whole bacteria or various chemical split products of bacterial cells, it has not been easy to obtain more than mild inflammatory and oedematous areas of the skin by these methods. Working with pneumococcus, the writers found that about 50% of full grown guinea pigs of 450 gm. or over reacted with severe, often hemorrhagic and necrotic skin reactions to intracutaneous injections of pneumococcus autol-ysates; young guinea pigs did not so react. It was found that both young guinea pigs and non-reacting, full grown guinea pigs could be so sensitized by repeated injections of pneumococcus autolysates. Subsequently, it was observed that sensitization can be accomplished with whole pneumococci, or with autolysates or bile solutions of pneumococcus, but that typical, severe, hemorrhagic skin reactions could be obtained only by intracutaneous injection of the autolysates. It is believed that in bacterial allergy the responsible agent is a substance liberated either by autolysis or by the lytic effect of inflammatory tissue reactions, such an antigen differing functionally from those obtained by the rough chemical manipulation necessary to break up the bacterial cells in vitro. Since only a few bacteria will auto-lyze easily, as does the pneumococcus, it is believed that the difficulties in elucidating the mechanism of allergy have been due to the fact that the type of antigen liberation taking place in tissue foci cannot be produced in vitro without a certain amount of denaturization. Taken with other facts, it is believed that the experiments explain the reason why typical tuberculin allergy necessitates formation of tubercles in which such antigen is liberated from the bacteria by the specific inflammatory tissues.

This publication has 5 references indexed in Scilit: