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Antigenic Analysis of Cultures of B. Paradysenteriae and B. Morgani Isolated During an Epidemic of Summer Diarrhea

From the Laboratories of the Mary Imogene Bassett Hospital, Cooperstown, New York

Abstract

The cultures forming the material for this study were obtained during an outbreak of diarrhea in August and September, 1927, in a small rural community in New York State. There were 10 cases in three families; only two children in the three families had no manifestations of the infection; no adults were affected. The symptoms were diarrhea with blood and mucus in the stools, fever, vomiting, prostration. The duration varied from two days to three weeks. The youngest patient was one year of age; the oldest was fifteen; the intensity and duration of symptoms were less in the older children. Organisms obtained for study were isolated from Endo and eosin methylene blue plates seeded with fresh specimens of stools.¹

Footnotes

¹ Epidemiologic investigation yielded data which pointed to a contaminated water supply as the source of infection of the family in which the first cases occurred. Flies or direct transmission probably accounted for the spread to the other two families. The three families obtained water from different sources, and each family had a different milk supply. The stools of all the milk handlers in the three dairies were examined, but no cultures were obtained of the typhoid or dysentery groups. The water used by each family was cultured; two of the water supplies were free from organisms of the typhoid, dysentery and colon groups; the third water supply, the one used by the family first affected, contained B. coli, but no B. dysenteriae, B. paradysenteriae or B. Morgani. This water came from a concrete receptacle fed by an overflow pipe from a spring in the cellar of a house forty feet away. Water from the spring in the cellar also contained B. coli, and although no communication between the house plumbing system and the spring could be detected, such presumably had occurred. Stools of all the regular occupants of the house were negative for organisms of the typhoid and dysentery groups, but motor tourists frequently stopped over night at this house and some transient may well have introduced the infection. The spread of infection from the first family affected to the other two families could have occurred either by flies as vectors, because each of the houses had an outside privy and the greatest distance between houses was less than 150 feet, or by direct contact, because the children mingled frequently. Unfortunately no cultures were made of the flies in the three houses. There was an interval of 9 days between the occurrence of cases in the first family affected and cases in the other two families.