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Studies on Sparganum Mansonoides and Sparganum Proliferum

1. When Sparganum mansonides is fed to mice, rats, rhesus monkeys, the ring tail monkey, and leopard frogs the head of the larva penetrates the intestinal wall and reëstablishes itself in the muscles, where it continues growth.

2. In the mouse the sparganum completes perforation of the intestinal wall within 1 hour and 15 minutes after being fed. Infection is prevented by the peculiar route followed by the larva, which after penetrating the mucosa, travels some distance beneath the peritoneal membrane before breaking through into the body cavity. Because of this indirect passage the contents of the intestine do not escape into the body cavity.

3. The adult scolex, from the intestine of the cat, when implanted into the tissues of mice, survives and grows for a period of approximately 3 weeks, but does not revert to a sparganum, nor does it undergo any degeneration

4. The rhesus monkey is readily susceptible to oral infection with procercoids, more than 600 active spargana having been recovered from a single orally infected monkey.

5. A condition simulating elephantiasis occurs in monkeys which have been infected over a period of months with spargana. This condition consists in a growth of fibrous tissue and the accumulation of lymph especially in the lower region of the trunk where the drainage frequently accumulates to form a large pendulous sac.

6. This drainage is due to the reaction set up by the wandering spargana and by disintegrating fragments of spargana.

7. Monkeys which have been given a series of injections of tapeworm substance before being infected do not develop this elephantiasis for the reason that the spargana are promptly encapsulated and thus prevented from migrating and fragmenting in the tissues.

8. Oedema occurs locally in the early stages of sparganosis in the monkey in severe infections, but is gradually resorbed. The terminal oedema, "elephantiasis," is not resorbed, but continues to enlarge indefinitely.

9. Sparganum infection in various hosts leads to a rise of from 15 to 35 per cent in the eosinophile leucocytes, which persists for a period of months.

10. There is a lesser, apparently temporary eosinophilia about 8 per cent, in infected cats carrying the adult worm.

11. Stiles' material of Sparganum proliferum has been restudied. It exhibits a profound internal degeneration, with loss of symmetry and axial relations.

12. The erratic form of Sparganum proliferum is regarded as the result of internal, rather than external factors, related to its structural degeneration and loss of symmetry. This degeneration may be due to metabolic factors relating to its length of life in the human host

13. The susceptibility of the monkey to oral infection renders human infection very probable. Possibly cases of sparganosis in man in the United States are overlooked because the larva is not familiar to physicians and because its location in the body is such that it would not ordinarily be discovered at autopsy.

Received March 30, 1938.