Studies on a Factor in Whole Wheat Flour, Modifying Pneumococcal Infection in Mice

[摘要] In recent communications Hitchings and Falco (1, 2) reported that mice fed laboratory stock diets or 100 per cent whole wheat bread were more susceptible to Type I pneumococcus infection than were those fed a purified synthetic diet, or enriched white bread. In attempting to explain this difference in susceptibility, they suggested that wheat germ and certain other crude foodstuffs contain a factor which promotes growth of the pneumococcus, and that diets rich in this factor thereby increase the fatality rate in infected hosts.Because these observations are difficult to reconcile with certain basic principles of nutrition relating to infection and immunity, we have repeated and extended these experiments.In preliminary experiments we observed, in contrast to the findings of Hitchings and Falco, that regardless of diet all or nearly all of the mice died within 36 to 72 hours after intraäbdominal infection with as few as six pneumococci.

[学科分类] 生物科学（综合）