Observations on Bacterial Anaphylaxis with Pneumococcus

Abstract

Abstract Bacterial anaphylaxis was studied during the early periods of investigation into hypersusceptibility in general by Rosenau and Anderson and others who were pioneers in this subject. All of these workers, employing the methods of animal injection, were well aware of the difficulties of occasionally distinguishing between anaphylaxis-like reactions and true anaphylaxis. It is, of course, a well recognized fact, at the present time, that the frequent toxicity of bacterial extracts may produce symptoms not easily distinguished from those of the moderate anaphylactic reactions, and that the intravenous injection of any finely divided suspension may lead to phenomena practically indistinguishable from the specific reaction, by a mechanism not yet understood, but surely different from that of true anaphylaxis. For this reason, one of the writers, with Parker, in 1917 employed the well known Dale method for the study of bacterial anaphylaxis, working with typhoid bacilli and their extracts (1).