“…In order to increase the understanding of the pathophys iology of abdominal abscesses and to facili tate studies of various treatment modalities, there is a growing demand for a reproducible small-animal model. The methods used so far have included puncture and ligation of the cecum [4,18,23,25], isolation and devascu larization of an ileal segment [8,10] as well as injection of endotoxin [7,9,13,20,21.24] or intravenous [1,5,8,[15][16][17] or intraperito neal [3,6,14,19] challenge with living bacte ria. Most of these studies have a death rate of 80-100% within 48 h which make the meth ods less suitable for pathophysiological stud ies.…”