鼠癩における宿主抵抗と病型の関係

Abstract

The present paper deals with the property of immunity induced by primary infection in malignant mouse leprosy, In a preliminary experiment of susceptibility of mice to subcutaneous inoculation with murine leprosy bacilli, it was found that hybrid mice between C3H and ddD responded with typical malignant leproma at the site of inoculation. Therefore, these mice were infected subcutaneously with murine leprosy bacilli and then subjected to subcutaneous superinfection with INAH-resistant bacilli 6 weeks later.In almost all cases, some delay in leproma onset was observed at the superinfected site, but the once appeared nodules showed gradual increase in size and reached to a large malignant leproma. In the later period, therefore, there was no significant difference in the leproma development of challenge infection between the two groups with and without primary infection. These findings show that this immunity manifests itself only by delayed development of leproma due to superinfection at the early period. However, an interesting observation was that exceptional one case showed a benign type leproma in the superinfected site, whereas malignant leproma was developing at the site of primary infection.Similar tendencies were observed in the subcutaneously challenged mice which had been previously infected intraperitoneally. But, as in the experiment of benign mouse leprosy, this experiment was inadequate to investigate sufficiently the immunity elicited by primary infection, because the severe visceral lesions of primary infection caused the hosts die within the observation period.