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Diphtheria Antibodies in the Urine of a Child After Intramuscular Injection of Antitoxic Horse Globulin

From the Department of Bacteriology and Immunology, Vanderbilt University Medical School, Nashville, Tennessee

Abstract

Tests for diphtheria antibodies were made upon the urine of a child with a mistaken diagnosis of diphtheria who had received intramuscular injections of a large amount of the usual therapeutic antitoxic horse globulin. The presence of the antitoxin antibody was proved both by the capacity of the urine to neutralize the toxin in vitro, and also by in vivo neutralization of toxin injected subcutaneously in guinea pigs several hours subsequent to the intravenous injection of the urine.

Therapeutic antitoxin solutions contain not only the antitoxin antibody, but also diphtheria antibodies of the antibacterial sort, recognizable by agglutination of a degraded strain of diphtheria bacilli; a certain amount of these antibacterial antibodies were also contained in the urine of the child who had received the therapeutic solution.

No serum protein was detected in the urine either by the usual chemical tests or by anaphylaxis tests. The failure to detect the globulin in the urine was not considered evidence of a separation of the antitoxin from the globulin with which it was originally injected, because both the chemical and anaphylaxis tests proved unable to detect the globulin in dilutions of therapeutic antitoxic globulin equivalent in antitoxin concentration to that found in the child's urine.

Footnotes

¹ Dr. Gaspari received a grant from the National Research Council.