Psittacosis

Although the disease psittacosis has been recognized for almost 6o years as an infectious disease of parrots which is easily transmissible to man, renewed interest in the subject has resulted from the fact that during the past year the disease suddenly became prevalent in many countries. During the summer and fall of I929, Argentina38 had many cases, and subsequently the disease became mildly epidemic in Germany, England and other European countries. From December, I929, to February, I930, the United States seems to have suffered from its share of cases. With remarkable similarity the accounts describe the sudden and explosive appearance of the disease in localized epidemic form, often in households which have been intimately associated with diseased parrots. These many small epidemics have already given rise to a voluminous literature on the subject, of which a detailed review is beyond the limits of this paper. Psittacosis is not a new disease. In iS 8o, Ritter28 described an epidemic occurring in his own family in which seven members who had been exposed to diseased parrots, became ill, four fatally. He gave credit for the initial description to Jiurgensen who had reported two cases of atypical pneumonia in I876, and who had noticed the relationship of the disease to infected parrots. Wagner35 in I884, Ost25 in I879, and Finkler in i888 reported similar epidemics, and, like Ritter, presented full autopsy details of their fatal cases. In I893 the disease first appeared in Paris. During this year two men imported from South America 200 parrots which were the remnant of an original 500, of which 300 had died in transit. Both men developed psittacosis, and from them and the parrots 40 other cases subsequently developed, of which I4 were fatal. Nocard24 described some of these cases, and Lepetit20 reported a case of septicemia with a history of exposure to diseased parrots. Gastou10 noticed the extreme variability of the pneumonic processes in all cases. Subsequently cases were described in France by Gilbert and Fournier"1, Descazals4, Nicolle23, and Villard34, all of whom noted