Hypersensitiveness to Diphtheria Bacterial Products

[摘要] Previous evidence indicative that toxin is the substance involved in C's hypersensitiveness was based upon the consistent association of high toxin content of test material with high degree of hypersensitive reactivity and of low or no toxin content with weak or no hypersensitive reactivity. The evidence in this paper was based upon the constant association between the antitoxin content of serum and the capacity of the serum to neutralize the hypersensitive agent when the toxin-containing filtrate is incubated with the serum before injection in individual C. Experiments with similar results were obtained with antitoxin-containing serum of horses, rabbits, and men. With the rabbit sera the use of an “antibacterial” as well as an “antitoxic” serum made it possible to show not only that a serum containing antitoxin was able to neutralize the hypersensitive agent but also that a serum rich in other antidiphtheria antibodies was unable to neutralize it. The most convincing results were obtained with human sera because it was possible by choice from a large number to select for the tests more purely “antitoxic” sera than could be obtained by the laboratory immunization of animals. The selected human sera, although containing no precipitins and no or only traces of “group agglutin,” were able to neutralize the agent of the hypersensitive reaction. Further experiments demonstrated a quantitative relationship between the antitoxin content and the amount of the respective serum required to neutralize the substance hypersensitively reactive with individual C.

[学科分类] 生物科学（综合）