Amendment of the tetanus toxin sensitivity hierarchy based on the lethal dose for man
1998
Rethy, L.A. (BETHESDA, Reformatus Gyermekkorhaz, Budapest (Hungary)) | Rethy, L. (Budapest (Hungary))
To the best knowledge of the authors, this is the first paper in which - on the basis of their already published data (Lancet, 1997. 335. 1518), the Homo sapiens is being ranked into the animals' sensitivity series against tetanus. Since in their recent paper the human lethal dose of tetanus toxin has been determined and reported on the basis of forensic opinions concerning the disaster caused by an unintentionally contaminated human anti-pertussis serum with tetanus toxin. The case was treated at the Budapest Municipal Criminal Court and the files were kept in official secrecy for forty years. The authors, were permitted to study and re-investigate the data contained in files kept in Budapest Municipal Archives Fond No XXCV. The data, large enough in number to be suitable for biometric analysis, originated in injecting 21 human subjects with a serum unintentionally contaminated with tetanus toxin. The human lethal dose was found at 10 mouse LD100/kg (SD 6.0) human body mass. The determination of LD100 was performed on random-bred white mice of 18 g body-mass in average. On the basis of present results, man is inserted in the "scale" of animal species based on their sensitivity to tetanus toxin, a scale proposed by VON BEHRING but generally called as Knorr's-scale. Man (Homo sapiens) proved 5 to 10 times more sensitive than the reference species (mouse) and approximately as sensitive as the horse and the guinea pig. The new table (sensitivity scale) - completed by human data - may serve as a new basis for comparing sensitivity of animal species to tetanus toxin. The authors point to the possibility of the existence of a parallelism between the sensitivity of the mammals to tetanus toxin and the degree of the immune response to the tetanus antigen
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