An Account of the So-called Reiter Treponeme

Abstract

Hans Reiter, the man whose name is given to the Reiter strain of treponeme, presents the history of this strain since the early twenties. He credits M. Ficker for the original successful isolation and cultivation in culture media. As evidence of the proven early virulence of the Reiter strain, he quotes a paper by Mulzer and Nothaas in 1928, in which it is reported that a pure fluid culture of a strain subcultured 200 times on an artificial media caused darkfield positive syphilitic infection in the rabbit. The strain was lost in Germany during World War II, but was maintained in the United States and returned to Germany after the war. Methods of making both solid and fluid media are detailed in the Appendix. Klopstock in 1926 and Gaehtgens in 1929 developed a complement fixation test using this strain as antigen. Eagle and Hogan confirmed these results in 1940. In 1925, to 1927, Sagel is said to have greatly improved the clinical status of paretics by injecting a living vaccine made from the Reiter strain. The RPCF test is stated to be the most valuable outcome of the investigations on the Reiter strain.