SECONDARY BACTERIAL INFECTION IN MICE 



with a highly virulent organism, then perhaps a real secondary 

 infection can be established. This is the direction that the work 

 is now taking, so the dream of studying secondary infections 

 may yet come true, 



ANDRE WES: May I make a rather philosophical comment which 

 applies to all the papers we have heard this morning ? It seems 

 to me that in every case, we have been presented with facts 

 which are rather difficult to explain, and I think the reason is 

 that, in these various instances, we don't know exactly why the 

 animal dies when it dies , what kills it, nor do we know what 

 saves the animal when the different mechanisms are operating. 

 It seems to me that in every instance, if only we knew why the 

 animal died and more details about what saved it, we would 

 be able to isolate the various factors and pin down what it is 

 that is affected by chilling. In Dr. Miya's paper, for instance, 

 I was very struck with the fact that from what he reported and 

 from what other people have reported, it didn't look as if chilling 

 ha,d a tremendous effect on the amount of antibody which was 

 formed, and yet in his chilled and unadapted mice, the immunity 

 mechanism, which on paper was perfectly adequate, failed to 

 work. Now, why wouldn't it work; what is the difference be- 

 tween these two groups of mice? If we knew what sort of thing, 

 I think we might understand how cold works. I am not suggesting 

 that we should abandon all work on chilling until we know the 

 answered to these fundamental questions, because I think it 

 is possible that studying the chilling may help us to understand. 

 What we need is for experiments going on in parallel on the 

 mechanism which operates under normal, ordinary circum- 

 stances, combined with more experiments on the effect of chilling. 

 I am sorry if all that appears platitudinous. 



NUNGESTER: I think it is very appropriate that this state- 

 ment be made, and this point of view be brought out. Just ask 

 a simple question: why do you have a fever when you have an 

 infection? 



CAMPBELL: Well, along the same lines, there are mechanisms 

 of defense other than antibody, of course. So I was wondering 

 what happens to the phagocytic cells and the lymphocytes ? There 



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