Abstract
Introduction. Comparatively few and limited observations have been made concerning the immunity mechanism in bubonic plague. Exhaustive reviews of the earlier literature on the subject have been given by Dieudonné and Otto (1). Petrie (2) and Pollitzer (3). The earliest investigators, Kolle and his associates (4) and Markl (5), studied particularly the influence of normal and immune serum inoculated simultaneously with the infecting plague bacilli into experimental animals and found bacteriolysis or phagocytosis or both. While these workers investigated the mechanism of passive immunity, Rowland (6) compared the progress of plague infection in normal and vaccinated animals and observed that the essential factor in active plague immunity was one which affected the rate of multiplication of the bacillus. Virulent bacilli multiplied as slowly in immune rats as avirulent organisms in normal ones, while the virulent infection of normal animals progressed very rapidly.
Footnotes
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↵1 Aided by grants from the Rosenberg Foundation and the Columbia Foundation.
- Received September 7, 1943.
- Copyright © 1944 by The American Association of Immunologists, Inc.
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