Transmission of an Active Agent From Rheumatoid Arthritis Synovial Tissue to Chicks

Abstract

In order to confirm and amplify the evidence of a transmissible agent in human rheumatoid arthritis (RA) tissue reported in mice experiments, data are presented indicating the transmission of the RA agent from this tissue to chicks as well as from chick to chick and by congenital transmission. Chicks hatched from injected embryonated eggs show clearly identifiable redness of the feet, talipes deformities, and dislocation of the hip. Control embryonated eggs hatched normal chicks. Roentgenograms showed developmental defects of the cervical, thoracic, lumbar, and sacral vertebrae. The chick embryo may provide an avenue to further examine the infectious etiology of RA.

Incidence of Hepatitis Associated Antigen HAA and Homologous Antibody in Patients with Rheumatoid Arthritis

“…The idea that an infectious agent may initiate the complex immunopathological events observed in the various connective tissue disorders is well known. Detection of mycoplasma, diphteroid organisms, mixovirus-like or other virus-like particles in association with some connective diseases, has provided new arguments to this hypothesis [3,8,17,21,29,30,33,39,40,45,47,48,[53][54][55]581. On the other hand, the pathogenetic importance of immune complexes has been emphasized in SLE, RA, other pathological conditions such as serum sickness, and some kidney and liver diseases [9, 16, 20, 32, 41, 431. At present, among the connective tissue diseases only a few cases of patients with PAN can be related to HAA.…”