New Method for Early Diagnosis of Celebes Type El Tor Vibrio Carriers.

Recently, Takeya and Shimodori (J. Bacteriol. 85:957, 1963) reported that every known strain of Celebes type El Tor vibrio is lysogenic and produces a characteristic temperate phage which has a very narrow host range. Further studies have revealed that 136 of 138 strains of El Tor vibrio isolated in the epidemic of the West Pacific from 1959 to 1963 were lysogenic and that all the temperate phages liberated from these strains were closely related serologically (Takeya et al., unpublished data). Therefore, the temperate phage from Celebes type El Tor vibrio has been tentatively designated as K-type phage. Our experiences during quarantine work in Japan in the 1963 epidemic showed that the detection of K-type phage from specimens is a useful method for the early diagnosis of Celebes type El Tor vibrio carriers, because one patient and seven carriers were detected by this method prior to the isolation of the vibrio. Preliminary experimental results to confirm our findings are described here. Various numbers of cells of Celebes type El Tor vibrio, strain Itazuke, were inoculated in 10 ml of alkaline peptone water (1% peptone, 0.5% NaCl, pH 8.2) containing 0.5 g of human feces, and were incubated at 37 C (Table 1). At 1-hr intervals, the culture was centrifuged and the supernatant fluid was subjected to both the ''spot test" and the plaque-count method for determining the presence of K-type phage. Vibrio comma strain H218 was used as the indicator strain. After 6 hr of incubation, the presence of K-type phage could be detected when as few as