Peripheral leucocyte migration. Inhibited by diphtheroid organisms isolated from patients with rheumatoid arthritis.

The isolation of diphtheroid organisms from rheumatoid synovial membranes and synovial fluids (Duthie, Stewart, Alexander, and Dayhoff, 1967; Clasener and Biersteker, 1969; Stewart, Alexander, and Duthie, 1969) has raised the question of the role of diphtheroid bacilli in the aetiology of rheumatoid arthritis. The view that rheumatoid disease might involve an abnormal cellular immunological response to an infective agent (Walton, 1968) suggested the need to determine whether cellular hypersensitivity to such diphtheroid isolates in subjects with classical rheumatoid arthritis was different from that in non-rheumatoid subjects.