A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF HEMOLYTIC STREPTO- COCCI ISOLATED FROM THE THROATS OF RESI- DENTS OF NEW ORLEANS AND NEW YORK

A comparative study of the geographic distribution of rheu-matic fever, scarlet fever and acute glomerulonephritis in Canada and the United States (Seegal, Seegal and Jost, 1935) has shown that two of these three diseases, rheumatic fever and scarlet fever, diminish in frequency in the South, while acute nephritis remains approximately as frequent in the South as in the North. Since clinical and laboratory data indicate that acute glomerulo-nephritis is usually initiated by a hemolytic streptococcus infec-tion, it appeared peculiar that the incidence of this disease failed to diminish in the southern United States while the incidence of the other two diseases due to hemolytic streptococci did decrease. During a further study of the incidence of acute glomerulo-nephritis in southern latitudes, Seegal, Seegal, Jost and Cameron (1935) obtained a series of throat cultures from cases of acute nephritis and acute pharyngitis, and from normal control throats of persons living in New Orleans, Louisiana. The strains of hemolytic streptococci isolated from these throat cultures were brought back to New York. The present report consists of a study of certain biological and immunological characteristics of 63 of these strains compared with 103 strains isolated in New York City.1 1 In both New Orleans and New York a number of minute hemolytic strepto-cocci of the type described by Bliss and Long (1934) were isolated. These organ-isms are omitted from this study since the cultural characteristics of several of them have already been presented by Long and Bliss (1934), and the remainder of our strains are similar to these