Supplement to the Annals of the Transvaal Museum. 
Proceedings of the Transvaal Biological Society. 
ANNALS 
OF 
Jhe Jransvaal Museum. 
Vol. II. FEBRUARY, 1910. No. 2. 
ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF PIROPLASMA IN THE 
DIFFERENT ORGANS. 
By Dr. R. Gonder. 
Since the investigations of R. Koch on East Coast fever of cattle in East 
Africa, the cause of this disease has formed the subject of much 
discussion. 
At present there exist two different views. Some investigators hold 
that East Coast fever is due to an invisible organism, others declare 
P. parvum to be the cause, but neither party has been able to prove to the 
satisfaction of the other that their investigations were free of errors. 
This is due to the fact that the cattle of Africa are, as a rule, infected with 
various parasites ; with P. bigeminum , and the more or less harmless 
parasite P. mutans , which, morphologically, is very difficult to distinguish 
from P. parvum. Moreover, there is much controversy on the so-called 
plasma granules or Koch’s bodies, also known as blue bodies, which are 
found in the organs of cattle suffering from East Coast fever. 
In this short publication, which will be succeeded by a more detailed 
one, I wish to communicate some investigations on the blue bodies of 
Koch which will throw some light on their nature. For the present I 
shall leave out details, neither can I enter into the literature on the 
subject, which will have to be considered in the more exhaustive 
report. 
Experiments were carried out since March of this year in the 
Transvaal Veterinary Bacteriological Laboratory. The material used 
consisted in cattle whose origin we know, and in ticks whose history we 
were fully acquainted with ; accordingly, double infections could be 
excluded from the very start. The ticks placed on control cattle directly 
imported from England proved that they were exclusively infected with 
East Coast fever. In addition to this, Dr. Theiler gave me permission to 
utilise the cattle used in various experiments on East Coast fever which 
had been infected experimentally through the implantation and inoculation 
of different organs. For my zoological studies, therefore, a considerable 
amount of material was available. 
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