SINCE we believe that the gastrointestinal tract, from the stomodeum down, is the prime portal of entry in poliomyelitis, we thought that a food (probably fruit) which enters the gastrointestinal tract could in some way act as a precursor or catalytic enzyme on a normal constituent of the tract and accelerate the production of poliomyelitis. Various materials, together with fruit extracts, were tested.
A toxic factor has been demonstrated in the stools and urines of patients ill with poliomyelitis,1 a fact confirmed by Kramer and his associates.2 The agglutinin titers of blood serum for enteric organisms were observed to be increased during convalescence from poliomyelitis.3
Coliform organisms isolated from the stools of patients ill with poliomyelitis, the toxins of these organisms and virulent poliomyelitis virus, when combined and injected into Macacus rhesus monkeys, accelerated the production of poliomyelitis in an experiment described by one of us (J.