A Preliminary Report on the Isolation and Identification of Pleuropneumonia-like Organisms from Poultry

Abstract

THE pleuropneumonia-like organisms (PPLO) are a group of those fastidious microorganisms which are filtrable, soft, fragile, and highly pleomorphic. Nocard and his associates in 1898 studied these microorganisms for the first time, and they considered these as the causative agents of bovine pleuropneumonia.The first isolation of these organisms from humans was reported in 1937 by Dienes and Edsall who recovered them from a suppurating Bartholin's gland. Since then a number of reports have appeared regarding the isolation of the PPLO either parasitic or saprophytic, the majority of the instances being from humans.Markham and Wong (1952) isolated the PPLO from exudates of chickens and turkeys with the chronic respiratory disease (CRD) and indicated that these could be cultivated in cell free medium.The CRD has been recognized as the disease of great economic importance to the poultry industry in the U.S.A., Canada, and other countries. In recent years the …