938 



HUMAN SERUM FROM CONVALESCENT CASES 



comprising eighty-one in all, exposed to epidemic parotitis at different times, were 

 immunized with an average injection of 3 cc. of convalescent serum within a period 

 varying from the first to the sixth day after exposure. Only one of these patients de- 

 veloped mumps; but eleven were discharged from observation before their possible 

 incubation period was over, and the results in these eleven immunized patients are not 

 known. The remaining sixty-nine showed no signs of the disease. The convalescent 

 blood used for this immunization was taken from healthy adult donors, who were 

 Wassermann negative and clinically free from any active signs of tuberculosis, be- 

 tween the extremes of the tenth and twentieth day, usually on the fourteenth or 

 sixteenth day of their disease. 



TABLE I 



Incidence of Mumps among Injected and Non-Injected Children (Hess) 



THE PROPHYLACTIC USE OF MEASLES CONVALESCENT SERUM 



Some thirty years ago, a German physician used large amounts of serum from 

 convalescents in the treatment of several cases in which the symptoms were just be- 

 ginning. The results were favorable, and he suggested that it might be used as a pre- 

 ventive measure. The first results published on the use of convalescent measles serum 

 as a preventive were by Nicolle and Conceil from the Institute of Pasteur in Tunis. 

 In the same year, 1916, Park and Zingher injected forty-one very recently exposed 

 children at the Metropolitan Hospital. Twenty of these children received 8 cc. of 

 serum, and none of them developed measles. Twenty-one received 4 cc. and three 

 developed the disease, one on the fifteenth day, one on the seventeenth day, and one 

 on the twenty-fifth day after the serum was given. 



Since then, a number of articles have been published on the use of whole blood, 



