The Isolation of Atoxic Strains of Bacillus Tetani in Egypt

While investigating the Bacillus welchi content of the stools of Egyptians we observed that a very large number of samples of faeces grown in Robertson's bullock heart medium produced terminal drumstick spore-bearing bacilli morphologically resembling Clostridium tetani. Accurate figures concerning the incidence of clinical tetanus in Egypt are not available. For the past decade in Kasr el Ainy Hospital (800 beds; outpatient weekly attendance over 10,000) an average annual death rate of 7 from tetanus in 1,200 from all causes is estimated. In a country like Egypt where the fellah is a true son of the soil this incidence would appear to be a low one. Tenbroeck and Bauer (1) found that 34 per cent, of the stools of 78 individuals in Peking yielded Bacillus tetani, and in a subsequent paper (2) that individuals carrying the bacilli had an appreciable amount of antitoxin in their blood sera. Their impression was that clinical tetanus was relatively uncommon in that area. Bauer and Meyer (3) in California found