Martin Frobisher

Properties of Strains of Corynebacterium diphtheriae Obtained from Various Parts of the United States

IN 1933, the writer and his collaborators, working in the Eastern Health District Laboratory at The Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health, in cooperation with the Baltimore City Health Department, undertook a series of investigations of diphtheria carriers, for the purpose of comparing the carrier rate among Baltimore school children at that time with the rate obtained by Doull and Fales and their associates in the same city and, for the most part, in the same schools, in 1921-1924.1 At the time these studies were being organized, the prevalence of the newly described 2 gravis type of Corynebacterium diphtheriae, and its relation to severe and fatal diphtheria, as observed in Enigland and Central Europe, were being discussed in all parts of the world. Little or nothing was known concerning the organism in the United States and, as a result, data were in demand regarding its distribution and epidemiological potentialities in this country. For this reason, in 1936, the Subcommittee on Diphtheria of the American Public Health Association, with the assistance of funds from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, co6perated with