Immunologic Responsiveness of Man to Penicillin

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Abstract
OBSERVATIONS of patients have repeatedly indicated that man may develop an immunologic response to penicillin that can cause hypersensitivity symptoms. Many antibiotics appear to be allergenic, but by no means to the same degree. Today penicillin heads the list of medicinal agents in the frequency, diversity, and severity of hypersensitivities which it induces,1 and it probably has replaced foreign sera as the most common cause of anaphylactic shock. In 1958, Ley and collaborators2 reported that penicillin-sensitized erythrocytes were agglutinated by the sera of some individuals who have been treated with penicillin. He presented evidence that the agglutination was not due to skin-sensitizing antibody, but to another antibody which seemed not to be implicated in hypersensitivity reactions. In his study, only 25 of 2,000 random sera investigated had factors capable of agglutinating penicillin-sensitized cells. Investigation of the case histories of 30 of these patients revealed a past exposure to