206 FOOD POISONING. 



in twenty-two families were made ill, one fatally, by eating pork 

 pie. The meat was cooked on November lOth and was eaten from 

 the 11th to the 14th. With the exception of one family, none of 

 those who ate of the pie on the 11th were made ill, and none of 

 those who^ate of it after the 14th. The harmful germ was a short 

 bacillus, cultures of which made mice sick, killing, some ; but 

 growths more than ten days old were without effect. In the " Car- 

 lisle (B) case," a pork pie was made November 1st and eaten by 

 some twenty-five persons during the following ten days. Mice fed 

 upon the meat developed on the second or third day a bloody diar- 

 rhoea, and died. The small intestine was filled with bloody mucus. 

 The lungs were congested, and in the animals which lived the longest 

 there was hepatization, chiefly in the upper lobe; the liver and 

 spleen were also congested. In the " Portsmouth case," two bacilli 

 — one motile, the other not — ^were found in the food. When first 

 received, the meat poisoned mice fed upon it, but after standing and 

 becoming offensive in odor, it failed to do so. Cultures of the non- 

 motile bacillus had a pleasant aroma, and were poisonous ; while 

 those of the motile germ were offensive and harmless. In the ani- 

 mals killed by the cultilre the lungs, kidneys and spleen were dark 

 and the small intestines were relaxed and filled with mucus. In 

 only one of the mice could the bacillus be found, and Klein states that 

 this germ is not pathogenic but that its cultures contain a toxin. In 

 the " Middlesborough Pneumonia Epidemic," Ballard attributed 490 

 deaths to infected bacon, and he believed that the disease, developed 

 in a person who had eaten of the infected food, was transmissible 

 from the sick to those who had not partaken of the bacon. This 

 has been observed in other epidemics of kreotoxismus and is due 

 to infection with microorganisms first obtained in the food and 

 then transmissible, probably through the sputum, to others. In the 

 lungs, Klein discovered a short bacillus, which he called " bacillus 

 pneumoniae," differing altogether from the bacillus of Friedlander 

 and from the diplococcus of Frankel, neither of which was present. 

 Of twenty samples of bacon forwarded from the infected districts, four- 

 teen were distinctly poisonous to rodents fed with it ; in two in- 

 stances, there was some doubt, and only four proved not to be poison- 

 ous. In the dead animals, lesions similar to those observed in 

 persons who died of the disease, in the infected districts, were found. 

 Similar results followed inoculation of the juice expressed from the 

 lungs and of pure cultures of the bacillus, and in all instances the 

 microorganism was recoverable. During the progress of Klein's 

 investigations an epidemic of pneumonia occurred among the animals 

 (mice, guinea-pigs, and monkeys) kept in the building where his ex- 

 periments were carried on, the bacillus pneumoniae being found after 

 death and sometimes in the heart's blood. On reexamination after 

 the lapse of three months, of samples of the bacon that had previously 



