The Action of Bacitracin and Subtilin on Treponema pallidum in Vitro and in Vivo

CONTENT ALERTS Receive: RSS Feeds, eTOCs, free email alerts (when new articles cite this article), more» Information about commercial reprint orders: http://jb.asm.org/site/misc/reprints.xhtml To subscribe to to another ASM Journal go to: http://journals.asm.org/site/subscriptions/ THE IN VITRO AND IN VIVO1 HIARRY EAGLE, ARLYNE D. MUSSELMAN, AND RALPH FLEISCHMAN The Laboratory of Experimental Therapeutics of the U. S. Public Health Service and The Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health, Baltimore, Maryland Received for publication December 2, 1947 Downloaded from http://jb.asm.org/ on December 9, 2011 by deepdyve E"citracin is an antibacterial substance discovered by Johnson, Anker, and Meleney (1945) in culture filtrates of the so-called Tracy strain of Bacillus subtilis. The toxicity of the drug and its absorption and excretion in dogs have been described by Scudi and his coworkers (Scudi and Antopol, 1947; Scudi, Clift, and Krueger, 1947). The blood levels obtained after the intramuscular administration of bacitracin, its urinary excretion, and its renal clearance in rabbits and man have been reported in a previous communication from this laboratory (Eagle, Newman, Greif, Burkholder, and Goodman, 1947). Subtilin is another agent produced by B. subtilis, described by Jansen and Hirschmann (1944). Its antibacterial activity in vitro and in vivo has been studied by Sall6 and Jann (1945). It differs from bacitracin both in its antibacterial spectrum and in its chemical properties. There have been no previous reports about the activity of these two antibiotics in the treatment of syphilis. As will be here reported, both were active in vitro against a cultured...