NEWS BY MAIL.

Hokitika Guardian, 20 July 1920, Page 3

NEWS BY MAIL.

MOLLY-CODDLED MICROBES,

MORE TROUBLE THAN AILING RABIES. LONDON, May 18. A national collection of microbes is being made at the Lister Institute, Chelsea Gardens, by the Medical Research Council, and it is hoped before long to have in Loudon the finest collection in the world of those tiny organisms which produce disease ill men, animals, and plants. The work started in earnest in January ; yesterday the curator, Dr St. John Brooks, told a “ Daily Mail ” representative how it is progressing.

“ Already,” lie said, “ we have cultures (colonies of millions of microbes growing in glass tubes) of all the organisms which attack human beings, as well as a number of those which affect horses, cattle, dogs, and plants. The collection is receiving additions from all parts of the world every day, and it is hoped to make it the host in the world!

“ Here,” said Dr Brooks, producing a glass tube containing a teaspoonful of milk-like fluid, “ are some millions of billions of anthrax bacilli which oamo from a shaving brush. In this other tube are the microbes of hird-tubercu-losis, which we got from the liver of a black-winged graekle (a kind of starling) that died at the Zoo. This bird-tubercu-losis does not affect human beings. In those other tubes we have the organisms that produce potato black-log, the stripe disease of tomatoes, the blossom blight of pears, the distemper of dogs. “ Look at that apparently harmless little tube or glass. There are countless millions of plague bacilli in it, and if they were let loose and distributed they would kill half the people in Chelsea. ’’

All those terrible enemies of men, animals, and plants are kept in little glass test-tubes measuring about 5 inches long and 'j-ineh in diameter. There are 10,009 or 12,000 tubes of them, and thev need more care than a delicate baby. They all have their peculiar little ways. Subcultures, a sort of replanting, have to be made at just the proper time. For instance, the meningococcus, which causes eerebro-spinnl meningitis, has to he " planted out ” at least every three weeks, or it would otherwise die out; the typhoid bacillus needs subculture only every three months, while the bnccillus of plague will live comfortably without attention for a whole year. Most of the microbes do well in ordinary room temperature, but some have to he kept in an incubator, among them the microbes of influenza and pnueumonin. The tuberculosis bacillus will live much longer in the incubator than at a lower temperature.