Fatal enteric cholera infection in the guinea pig. Bact

cholerae, as well as other enteric patho-gens, produce the symptom complex of diarrhea is poorly understood. Burrows, Wagner and Mather (1944) demon-strated that vibrio endotoxin increases the diffusion of fluid through living sem-ipermeable membranes. Later, Burnet and Stone (1947) found that vibrio mucinase desquamates guinea pig in-testine in vitro, and the possible role of this enzyme in the pathogenicity of cholera has also been discussed (Jensen, 1953; Raffel, 1953). Intensive studies have been done by others on the phar-macological action of bacterial endo-toxins (literature summarized lately by Burrows, 1951). All these workers, how-ever, used the parenteral injection of endotoxin preparation into animals. Their results are for this reason only partly applicable to conditions in the actual diseases, especially cholera, where endotoxin is liberated mainly into the lumen of the bowel. The relative sever-ity and the time of onset of the different symptoms observed after parenteral doses of endotoxin will presumably be different when the endotoxin is resorbed from the intestine. It has, therefore, not been established yet whether the symptoms observed in human cholera are due to direct or central action of endotoxin (De, Sarkar and Tribedi, 1951) or whether they are caused merely by the extreme dehydration from diar-rhea. The latter interpretation is Received for publication September 21, 1954