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Observations on Experimental Chagas' Disease in Dogs
Summary
- 1.Experimental Chagas' disease has been produced in adult dogs by inoculation with culture forms of “A” and “B” strains of Trypanosoma cruzi and with blood forms of “W” strain.
- 2.Occasional spontaneous recoveries occurred in adult dogs but untreated infections in puppies were uniformly fatal.
- 3.The prepatent periods for “W”, and “A”, and “B” strains were: 5 to 10 days, 9 to 13 days, and 10 to 42 days, respectively.
- 4.The prepatent period was a little shorter in animals infected subcutaneously than in those infected intraperitoneally.
- 5.The prepatent periods and the survival times did not differ between the sexes but the parasitemias in males were higher than in females.
- 6.In unmedicated puppies death from acute myocarditis ordinarily ensued between 8 and 39 days following the appearance of trypanosomes in the blood.
- 7.The median survival time in untreated infections in puppies was 34 days from the time of inoculation; the shortest was 27, the longest 49 days.
- 8.Paraplegia was occasionally observed in adult dogs infected with “B” and “W” and occurred once in a puppy which survived the acute myocarditic stage as a result of medication with Bayer 7602.
- 9.Agglutination tests, using live culture as antigen, did not give consistent results during any of the periods of the disease.
- 10.The intravenous administration of Bayer 7602 did not usually alter the course of Chagas' disease in puppies; isopentaquine was usually not curative in tolerated doses.
- 11.Pentaquine, given orally, produced cures in puppies as evidenced by suppression of symptoms, eradication of parasites from the blood, survival, and absence of leishmania forms in the tissues at autopsy.
- 12.Although isopentaquine is more toxic than pentaquine in animals, the opposite is apparently the case in man; either compound might prove to be useful in clinical Chagas' disease.