﻿A PRELIMINARY REPORT OF EXPERIMENTS ON THE CULTIVA- 

 TION OF THE VIRUS OF RINDERPEST IN VITRO 



By William Hutchins Boynton 

 {From the Veterinary Division,^ Bureau of Agriculture, Manila, P. I.) 



The literature on rinderpest contains numerous reports of 

 investigations carried on with the object of isolating the caus- 

 ative agent of that disease. Tartacovsky(i) gives a thorough 

 review of the results obtained by numerous workers up to 1896. 

 Nencki, Sieber, and Wijnikewitch(2) in 1898 published a paper 

 on the etiological agent of rinderpest, but their conclusions have 

 not been verified. They did, however, report success in main- 

 taining the virus in vitro to the fourth generation. No explicit 

 statement was made regarding the time covered by these four 

 generations, but the writers observed that it is best to transfer 

 cultures every three days. Koch (3) in 1897 in the second report 

 of his investigations in South Africa on the etiology of rinderpest 

 states that all his efforts to isolate and cultivate the virus of 

 rinderpest were fruitless. 



In the present report there will be given merely a summary 

 of the preliminary experiments which have been carried on at 

 the veterinary research laboratory at Alabang and which have 

 led up to the present work. 



It was observed from various experiments that the causative 

 agent of rinderpest remained alive and maintained its virulence 

 much longer under anaerobic than when under aerobic con- 

 ditions. The medium used in these earlier experiments was 

 principally virulent blood drawn under aseptic conditions from 

 animals suffering with the disease. It was noted that blood 

 drawn from an animal in the early stages of the disease — ^that 

 is, from one to three days after the initial rise of temperature — 

 maintained its virulence much longer than blood drawn from 

 an animal in the later stages of the disease, near the point of 

 recovery or of death. Undoubtedly the antibodies present in 

 the samples of blood play an important role in the last-mentioned 

 condition. 



' Archibald R. Ward, chief. 



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