MICROCOCCUS INTRACELLULARIS MENINGITIDIS 



533 



eases must have included a great many treated too late to permit 

 any kind of treatment to be effective. Flexner 's statistics of cases 

 under serum treatment show that, of 1211 cases, analyzed, those 

 treated between the first and third day (199) showed a mortality 

 of 18.1 per cent, those treated between the fourth and seventh day 

 (346) showed a mortality of 27.2 per cent, and those treated later 

 than the seventh day (666) showed a mortality of 36.5 per cent. 

 The following table taken from a paper by Flexner, published by 

 the Rockefeller Institute as a Bulletin in 1917, gives similar com- 

 parative mortality statistics reported by different observers. 



COMPARATIVE MORTALITY REPORTED BY VARIOUS OBSERVERS 42 



Altogether, then, it seems quite 'clear that serum treatment has 

 made a tremendous difference in the mortality from this otherwise 

 so fatal disease. 



OTHER GRAM-NEGATIVE MICROCOCCI WHICH MUST BE 

 DIFFERENTIATED FROM MENINGOCOCCI 



MICROCOCCI CATARRHALIS. This organism is more particularly 

 described in a separate section below. It is one of the common 

 organisms which may confuse carrier examinations because of its 

 frequent presence in the nose and throat of normal human beings. 

 Its fermentation reactions are described in the table from Elser and 

 Huntoon 43 also given below. The organisms are slightly larger than 

 meningococci, grow readily on the simplest media, the colonies are 

 larger, thicker, opaque and white, and have a tendency to dryness 

 quite distinct from the dew-drop like appearance of meningococcus 

 colonies, and do not agglutinate in specific serum. They show a 



42 Flexner, Bulletin of the Rock. Inst. for Med. Ees., 1917, 



43 Elser and Huntoon, Jour. Med. Res., 20, 1909, 371, 



