Experimental Inoculation of Chickens with Hodgkin's Nodes

Abstract

Summary and Conclusions Five healthy chickens were inoculated intravenously with emulsions of lymph nodes from two cases of clinically and histologically characteristic Hodgkin's disease. All of these chickens developed either a typical, or an atypical tuberculosis, and in the tissue smears, stained by Ziehl-Neelsen method, acid-fast granules and rods, extra- and intra-cellular, were demonstrated in three of them, and non-acid-fast granules in one of them. Reinoculation of material from the lesions of one of these chickens into another chicken produced an identical, though more extensive manifestation of the disease. An atypical tuberculosis developed in guinea pigs by inoculation of the tissue from the fourth chicken. A growth of bacteria with the staining and cultural characteristics of the avian tubercle bacillus was produced on egg media from material from this guinea pig. Cultures from these birds on egg media were contaminated in all instances. In one, the chicken culture gave a symbiotic growth of a blastomyces like organism with an acid fast bacillus. These cultures were reinoculated into normal chickens and guinea pigs, but sufficient time has not elapsed to determine the results of this reinoculation. While it is recognized that the two short series of experiments here reported cannot quite exclude the apparently unlikely alternative explanation, that we were dealing with an accidental avian infection, the findings seem to justify the conclusion that in these chickens, a lesion with the histological features of Hodgkin's granuloma, and comparable to avian tuberculosis has been produced after the inoculation of emulsified Hodgkin's nodes. This may indicate that the etiological agent in certain forms of Hodgkin's disease is pathogenic for birds, or that the avian tubercle bacilli are a factor in producing some of the lesions which are interpreted as Hodgkin's disease.