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The Effect of Acute Radiation Injury on Phagocytic Mechanisms of Antibacterial Defense¹

From the Department of Microbiology, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and School of Hygiene and Public Health, Baltimore, Maryland

Abstract

A systematic study of the effect of acute radiation injury upon the natural resistance of mice to experimental pneumococcal myositis has revealed that the principal factor involved in the lowered resistance of the irradiated host is a marked depression in the mobilization of phagocytic cells at the site of the primary lesion. The delayed and diminished inflammatory response, which coincides with the postirradiation leukopenia, permits the pneumococci to reach a population density in the lesion approximately a thousand times greater than that observed in unirradiated mice. The relatively few leukocytes, which in these circumstances manage to reach the lesion, exhibit no demonstrable impairment of phagocytic activity and show only an equivocal change in their capacity to kill the pneumococci which they ingest.

Footnotes

¹ Supported by Research Contract DA-49-007 MD-969 from the Research and Development Division of the Office of the Surgeon General, United States Army.

² Present address: Department of Microbiology, Duke University School of Medicine, Durham, N. C.