Professional Documents
Culture Documents
33
DURING the past two years we have producing organisms. In each of the
had the opportunity of studying four epidemics, stool of affected babies
six separate epidemics of diarrhea of was given nasally to a calf. This ma-
the new-born occurring in three hospi- terial was Seitz filtered in three of the
tals in the Baltimore-Washington area. instances, unfiltered in the fourth. In
This study has been approached from all four instances there followed in the
the standpoint of a possible filtrable calf a bloody, mucoid diarrhea with
agent etiology of the disease. comparable incubation period and clini-
The first two epidemics occurred al- cal characteristics.
most simultaneously at two Baltimore On the first occasion in which this
hospitals in the early fall of 1941. result was obtained in the calf, the
Stools, blood, and nasal washings were question arose as to whether attempt
obtained from a number of the babies at further serial calf-to-calf passage
and injected by various routes into a would be worth while. The calf, like
variety of the smaller animals. No the human infant, is naturally prone to
definite disease resulted in any of the diarrheal episodes from a variety of
animals. causes, and the mere occurrence of
The subsequent four epidemics oc- diarrhea following injection in a calf
curred during 1942, two of them in the would not necessarily signify that suc-
full-term nursery of a Baltimore hos- cessful passage had been carried out.
pital and two in the premature nursery However, in view of the presence of
of a Washington hospital. All four blood and mucus in the stools of this
were characterized by a high morbidity first calf, it was hoped that if there
rate; in the last three of these epidemics were an agent here which could be pas-
the mortality was high, while in the saged, the clinical picture in the calf
first, occurring among full-term babies might be distinctive enough to provide
during the month of March, the mor- fairly reasonable assurance of successful
tality was low. Stool cultures were passage. This hope has apparently
uniformly negative for known diarrhea- been realized; successive calf passages
were found readily possible with each
*
Presented at a Joint Session of the Epidemiology,
of the four strains and the results of
Health Officers, Maternal and Child Health, and cross-immunity studies have indicated
Laboratory Sections of the American Public Health that the four strains represent a single
Association at the Seventy-second Annual Meeting in
New York, N. Y., October 14, 1943. agent.
[1451]
1452 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PUBLIC HEALTH Dec., 1943
The studies which were carried out, pneumonia in the calves affected by the
however, indicated that the cause of his agent discussed in this paper, and
disease was not this same agent, and second because of failure with it of
at the present time it is impossible to transmission to mice even after a num-
say whether or not this disease occurs ber of serial mouse passages.
naturally among calves. The conclusions which seem justified
In this connection, another question from the data presented are:
comes up which refers to the possibility
1. In connection with four separate epi-
that this agent might actually be identi- demics of diarrhea of the new-born a
cal with the pneumoenteritis virus, iso- filtrable agent has been isolated which regu-
lated by Baker 1 from a natural disease larly produces diarrhea in calves.
of calves characterized clinically by 2. In the attempts so far made, this agent
pneumonia and diarrhea.
has not been isolated from the stools of
Though normal infants or normal calves.
samples of this virus were not available 3. The evidence suggests, though it is not
for experimental comparison, it seems conclusive, that the agent may be a cause
unlikely on the basis of the evidence of epidemic diarrhea of the new-born.
at hand that the two agents are the REFERENCE
same, first because of the absence of 1. Baker, J. A. Cornell Vet., 30:202-204, 1942.