Word: streptococci
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...British investigators, who reported that some mouse antigens appear remarkably similar to man's and might therefore serve as a source of raw material. More surprisingly, New York University's Dr. Felix T. Rapaport reported that a similar antigen can be extracted from some of the common streptococci. These are the microbes that cause "strep throats," scarlet fever, rheumatic fever, and a severe form of kidney disease...
Rapaport would only say that his experimental results indicated a line for further research. But the implication for future treatment was clear, although the method by which the antigen would be treated or administered to protect a graft was not. If it happens that the detested streptococci are eventually "farmed" as a wholesale source of raw material for a transplant vaccine, that will be no more surprising than the transplant successes already achieved...
...invading particles of foreign antigen (antibody-triggering substances) are numerous enough. In the medical equivalent of a massive military diversion, doctors try to overload the immune mechanism temporarily by flooding it with antigen particles. By coincidence, an antigen sufficiently similar to the human type is in some streptococci. So these bacteria, usually rated as harmful, are being mass-produced in a program backed by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The antigen, chemically removed from its microscopic bacterial source, is being distributed to investigating doctors...
...master's at the time and began working for her doctorate in microbiology at Columbia University, had no trouble finding a problem on which to concentrate. Encouraged by her husband, Geneticist Donald E. Lancefield, she became one of the first bacteriologists to recognize that the streptococci are an appallingly complex group of microbes. She spent a decade in the laboratory, painstakingly classifying different strains of streptococci according to the poisons they produce. By 1928 she was ready to report that the bugs that cause scarlet fever and destroy red blood cells and pave the way for rheumatic fever...
Just how the streptococci cause the kidney inflammation, however, is not yet known. It is not by direct infection. Likeliest explanation, said Dr. Thompson, is an immune reaction. The inflamed kidneys take weeks or months to return to normal. Children are more likely than adults to develop nephritis. But 90% of children, as against only 50% of adults, recover completely...