BACTERICIDAL EFFECT OF HIRUDIN AND HEPARIN: II. GROWTH OF ORGANISMS IN BLOOD RENDERED INCOAGULABLE WITH HIRUDIN AND HEPARIN

In another paper, 1 we reported the effects of the application of leeches and of the intravenous injection of hirudin and heparin on bacteremia induced in dogs by the intravenous injection of a suspension of staphylococci. We became interested in this investigation because of the good results we obtained with leeches in the treatment of phlebitis and because of the report by Bosc and Delezenne 2 in which the authors stated that animals are protected from bacteremia by the intravenous injection of hirudin and that in vitro there is an inhibition of the growth of organisms in blood to which hirudin has been added. We conducted both in vivo experiments (on dogs) and in vitro experiments to determine if we could demonstrate such an effect of hirudin on the growth of organisms in blood. Our in vitro experiments are reported in this paper. EXPERIMENTS Experiment 1. —Nine sterile test tubes