Cure of Experimental Staphylococcal Meningitis.

Abstract

Purulent meningitis was induced in rabbits, employing a technical procedure essentially the same as that of Felton and Wegeforth, by intracisternal injection of Staphylococcus aureus, using cultures of a strain (Sca) derived from human meningitis and also cultures of the same strain after rabbit passage (237). Some of these animals were then subjected to treatment with bacteriophage, sulfathiazole or with both these agents. Table I presents briefly the results in a preliminary group of 6 rabbits. The untreated controls died on the second day. The other 4 animals were treated with bacteriophage, beginning a few hours after inoculation. Only one survived, Rabbit 261, apparently the pioneer observation of recovery from experimental staphylococcal meningitis. The culture strain Sca, maintained on agar slants, gradually lost virulence so that not every control animal inoculated with a minute dose would die of meningitis. The results in a group of 10 rabbits inoculated with strain 237 on March 31 are shown in Table II. The 4 untreated control animals all died of meningitis by the 5th day. The other 6 animals were treated with sulfathiazole beginning on the day of inoculation, and of these 5 died of meningitis and one survived. Other experiments, in which this same culture strain was used and both bacteriophage and sulfathiazole were administered revealed a sharper contrast between treated and untreated animals. Table III indicates briefly the result in one such experiment. All 4 of the untreated controls developed purulent meningitis and were dead on the 4th day.