406 A MANUAL OF BACTERIOLOGY 



diagnostic purposes. About 40-50 per cent, of lepers 

 without evidence of syphilitic infection give a positive 

 Wassermann reaction. 



Cases of leprosy, both of the nodular and ansesthetic 

 varieties, have been treated with injections of Koch's 

 old tuberculin, which produces a reaction, sometimes 

 marked, followed by some amelioration in their condi- 

 tion. Rost and Williams with their cultures have pre- 

 pared vaccines with which treatment is being pursued. 

 Nicholls and others have used extracts of leprous tissue 

 as a vaccine, and Bayon states that a filtered extract of 

 the Kedrowsky culture is of service for treatment. 



Deycke injected a vaccine prepared with his strepto- 

 thrix into lepers with apparently a beneficial effect. The 

 acid-fast property of the streptothrix resides in a fatty 

 substance which can be extracted with solvents, particu- 

 larly benzoyl chloride. The fatty substance Deycke 

 terms " nastin " ; it is a neutral fat, the glycerin ester of 

 a fatty acid of high molecular weight. Injected into 

 leprosy patients, it sometimes produces marked reaction. 

 In solution in benzoyl chloride it is much more active, 

 and Deycke introduced it as a curative vaccine in leprosy. 

 In India the results of nastin treatment have been 

 favourable on the whole ; in Guiana and South Africa 

 they have been unfavourable. 1 



Dean 2 and others have met with a leprosy-like disease in the rat. 

 Marchoux found about 5 per cent, of the sewer rats in Paris 

 infected with it. Nodules are found in the tissues which contain 

 large numbers of an acid-fast bacillus closely resembling the B. 

 leprce. Material from infected rats inoculated into healthy rats 

 reproduces the disease after some months, but has no effects on 

 guinea-pigs. The disease is probably conveyed by contact. 



1 Scott, Indian Journ. Med. Research, vol. i, No. 2, 1913, p. 352. 



2 Journ. ofHyg., vol. v, 1905, p. 99 ; Marchoux arid Sarel, Ann. de VInst, 

 Pasteur, xxvi, 1912, p. 778. 



