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Infant-feeding in its relation to health and disease (1901)
Infantfeeding in its relation to health and disease - 1901 Author:Louis Fischer Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. Action Of The Saliva On Various Bacteria. TRlOLO2 describes a series of interesting experiments with saliva. He first irrigated the month with ... more »bichloride or permanganate-of-potash solution, followed by irrigation with sterilized water until the disinfecting substances were removed, and then inoculated the surface of various culture-media with the sputum. His results proved that saliva possesses a distinct antibactericidal property, for cultures of five-day-old bacteria were destroyed, as well as fresh bacteria eighteen hours old. This property, however, was lost when saliva was filtered. The saliva of the parotid and submaxillary glands, taken singly, were equally efficacious as their combined secretion. He believes that the greatest bactericidal action is due to the secretion of the mucous glands in the mouth. The Influence Of Gastric Juice On Pathogenic Germs. Gastric juice is, according to the experiments of Drs. Kurlow and Wagner,3 an exceedingly strong germicidal agent, and when living bacilli get into the intestinal canal it is due to various conditions entirely independent of the gastric juice. When the latter is normal and in full activity, only the most prolific microbes—such as tubercle bacilli, the bacilli of anthrax, and perhaps the staphylo- - Kivista d'Igiene e di Med. Prat., Neapel. "Vracht; Lancet, March 22, 1890. chapter{Section 4cocci—escape its destructive action; all others are destroyed in less than half an hour. Similar influences exist in the intestines, as proved by inoculation with the cholera bacilli. Judging from the results of experiments made by Zagari, Straus, and Wurtz, who exposed various pathogenic organisms, among others that of tuberculosis, to the action of gastric juice, we must come to the conclusion that, ...« less