Complement-fixation test, which had been used as the method for the serological diagnosis of syphilis, has been applied to the diagnosis of many other diseases. In rickettsial diseases, Davis carried out complement-fixation test, in 1911, using the spleen of guinea-pig and the nit of louse infected with Rocky Mountain spotted fever as antigen. Papamarku, Jacobsthal, Epstein and other many workers elaborated to accomplish this test, using alcohol extract of materials from epidemic typhus cases or infected lice. Organ extract was, however, lacking in the number of rickettsiae and louse antigen showed strongly unspecific reaction, thus neither was satisfactory. Castaneda in 1936 obtained positive complement-fixation reactions in cases of active and past infection with Mexican typhus and Brill's disease, using the rickettsial suspension obtained from peritoneal cavity of x-rayed and then typhus infected rats as antigen. Since 1938, when Cox succeeded to cultivate Rocky Mountain spotted fever and typhus group rickettsiae in yolk sac of developing chick embryos, it became easier to get highly concentrated rickettsial suspension, then complement-fixation test in rickettsial diseases made great progress. Thus this test was proved to be valuable in -serological diagnosis of almost all rickettsial diseases by Bengtson, Plotz and so on. Furthermore, after the method of producing antigen being improved by Craigie in 1945, the test was applied extensively in the epidemiological, serological and immunological studies on rickettsial dlseases.
There is, however, no uniformity in technic of complement-fixation test, a good many modifications being devised by many workers, and not so many have been discussed about technical differences among them. Van der Scheer et al, studing on antigenicity of diagnostic antigens for epidemic typhus, murine typhus and Rocky Mountain spotted fever, pointed out that incompletely purified antigen was apt to react unspecifically, when complement fixation was carried out for an overnight at a low temperature. Schubert et al compared five different complement fixation technics used in rickettsial diseases and concluded that a highly sensitive method was inferior in specificity, one superior in specificity was less sensitive and that an intermediate technic was the best. Damon et al, comparing water-bath fixation method with ice-box method, held the same view with Schubert on sensitivity.
Though the value of complement-fixation test as a serological reaction in rickettsial diseases has been generally thus appreciated, there is still enough ground for further investigation in details, similarly to the diagnosis of syphilis.
Well, we have been endeavouring to devise a more sensitive complement fixation technic in order to contribute to the development of the early diagnosis for typhus fever group infections. Several methods, including those commonly used technics and our own modifications, chiefly their sensitivity were compared.

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A streptomyces strain, No. 154 T-3, isolated by Okami, Maeda, Kosaka and Umezawa (1), produced an antibiotic inhibitorily effective to Mycobacteria. Since the antibacterial effect was limited to Mycobacteria and this strain belonged to a new species, this antibiotic was considered to be new. Therefore, its extraction and purification was studied. However, when the writer obtained it in the crystalline state and studied its chemical and antibacterial characters, the writer learned the short publications of Sobin (2), and McLamore, Celmer, Bogert, Pennington and Solomons (3), describing the chemical characters and the synthesis of an antibiotic produced by a strain of streptomyces. Comparing the chemical characters of the writer's antibiotic with those of the above authors', the writer came to the conclusion that they are identical.
According to the above authors, this antibiotic had been found and synthesized also by another group of researchers, Abbot Laboratories, and it had been named actithiazic acid. Its structure was established as (-) 2- (5-carboxypentyl) -4-thiazolidone.
Though the present antibiotic is identical with that of above two research groups, the writer's extraction and purification process is not completely the same, and besides, the cultural conditions and biological characters of this antibiotic have not yet been reported. Therefore, in the present paper, the shaking culture, the extraction, the purification, the chemical characters, the antibacterial and antif ungal tests and the toxicity are described.

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There have been several strains of Shigella flexneri reported in Japan as a new subtype because of their minor antigenic variation from the standard type strains. These strains were forwarded to our laboratory for justification and criticism. The present paper is dealing with these strains and the criticism of their position in the Shigella classification.

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The production of chloramphenicol has been found to be dependent on the nature of carbon sources. Three kinds of carbohydrates, glycerol, maltose, and starch have been found to be most suitable for the production. By examining the changes of carbohydrates during the growth of chloramphenicolproducing strain, if certain differences among different carbon sources could be found, it would contribute to clarify the intermediate course of the formation of chloramphenicol molecule.
For this purpose, carbohydrates, organic acids, aromatic amino compounds and aromatic nitro compounds were examined at various periods of the growth. Generally, the chloramphenicol-producing strain isolated from soil requires an organic nitrogen sources. For present experiments, however, organic nitrogen sources can not be used, owing to their carbohydrate contamination. Therefore, a mutant which produced chloramphenicol in the synthetic media was used in the present experiment and some points different from the previous experiment were found. The findings of the experiment are presented in the following.

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The present paper is dealing with a new Salmonella type isolated from three cases of acute gastroenteritis occurred in a family. The organism has typical cultural and biochemical characteristics of the members of Salmonella group and is considered to be a new type belonging to C₂ group.

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In 1948, Dr. G. Dalldorf⁽¹⁾ discovered a new virus pathogenic for both suckling mice and suckling hamsters from the feces of children having symptoms similar to those of poliomyelitis, and the virus was called “Coxsackie Virus”. Thereafter, in U. S. A. and European countries, the same virus strains have been isolated one after another from the patients of some acute febrile illnesses with diverse clinical pictures, namely, non-paralytic poliomyelitis, ⁽¹⁾⁽²⁾ aseptic meningitis, ⁽⁵⁾ Bornholm⁽⁴⁾⁽⁶⁾ disease (epidemic myalgia or epidemic pleurodynia) or summer grippe⁽³⁾ and so forth. It is hard to consider, however, these diseases as a single infection, because they show various clinical pictures.
Bornholm disease (epidemic myalgia or epidemic pleurodynia) has been recognized as a commonly occurring disease in the Scandinavian countries for about last twenty years, ⁽⁶⁾ but there have been no reports on this disease in Japan.
During the months from June to September in 1951, a minor localized outbreak of acute febrile disease of unknown etiology occurred in a factory (Fuji Communication Apparatus Co., Ltd.) . Dr. Fukumi of the National Institute of Health was requested to investigate the causative agent of this epidemic. The investigation of Dr. Fukumi have resulted in the isolation of a virus strain pathogenic for suckling mice from one fecal specimen and two throat washings. The presence of neutralization antibodies for the newly isolated virus was confirmed in the patients' sera. The details of virological studies will be reported by Dr. Fukumi. Therefore, this report describes only the epidemiological and clinical observation of the epidemic.

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Paragonimiasis patients usually discharge typical viscous sputa of rusty brown color which contain numerous eggs of paragonimus. The best method for the diagnosis of paragonimiasis is to find paragonimus eggs in such typical sputum. However, in the case of mass examination, we can not always obtain such a typical specimen of sputum from every patient. On the other hand, very frequently, patients swallow their sputa unconciously, and, as the result of this, it is possible to recover the eggs from their stool. Tominaga (1942) examined sputa and stools of the same patient at the same time on 50 cases and recovered paragonimus eggs in 99.4% of the sputa examined and 13.8 of the stool examined. Faust (1949) stated that eggs appear in the stools of about 40% of the patients having only pulmonary symptomes. The rate of recovering eggs from stools, however, would vary according to the method of the stool examination applied.
From the summer of 1950 to the winter of 1951, the authors had a chance of examining eggs of paragonimus in sputa and stools of the same person simultaneously on 35 paragonimiasis patients. The method used for stool examination was AMS III centrifuging technic.

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