BACTERIOLOGICAL STUDIES ON ATYPICAL MYCOBACTERIA ISOLATED IN JAPAN

Abstract

Bacteriological and biochemical characters of rapidly growing mycobacteria that caused pulmonary disease were studied in comparison with three Mycobacterium runyonii strains and ten Mycobacterium fortuitum strains. Pathogenic rapid growers tested were one strain from patient Yamamoto (Urabe & Kawai, 1957), one strain from patient Sato (Konno et al., 1964) and six strains from patient Yoshida. The third case was found in our hospital and described firstly in this paper. The patient is a forty-year old woman and had a large cavity in her left upper lobe. In spite of the presence of drug resistances to all antituberculous drugs (streptomycin, PAS, isoniazid, kanamycin, ethionamide, cycloserine and ethambutol), the cavity was closed by a six-month-regimen of the chemotherapy with streptomycin, PAS and isoniazid, but leaving a continuous excretion of a small number of acid-fast bacilli other than tubercle bacilli in her sputum.