Abstract
In spite of the advancements made during the past years in sanitation and infant care, diarrheal disease, including epidemic diarrhea of the newborn, still contributes to a large extent to the morbidity in this age group. Investigations have proven that infantile diarrhea is not a monoetiological disease. In some outbreaks members of the Salmonella and Shigella groups are responsible and in other instances viral agents are recovered. However, there can be little doubt that certain serological types of Escherichia coli are sometimes responsible. |This concept that certain E. coli types are involved in infantile diarrhea is not new. For more than 50 years workers have investigated and discussed the role of coliform bacteria in summer diarrhea and infantile enteritis. Early investigators were hampered by the fact that only biochemical studies had been employed. Unfortunately this was not adequate, because it has been found that the E. coli group is composed of different serotypes that give identical biochemical reactions. Other workers employed serological techniques including both slide and tube agglutination methods in addition to biochemical tests. More recently fluorescent methods have been utilized in identifying the pathogenic serotypes of E. coli. |The purpose of this thesis is to compare the methods of slide and tube agglutinations and fluorescent antibody studies in an effort to determine which technique would be the most satisfactory in the detection of pathogenic serotypes of E. coli in a laboratory.