Influence of Antibiotic Therapy of Mice on the Humoral Immune Response Against Sheep Erythrocytes

Abstract

Antibiotics may alter the host-parasite relationship by modification of bacterial properties, e.g., expression of capsular polysaccharides or other surface constituents [16–25] or liberation of toxins [8] of lipopolysachharide, etc. On the other hand, they may exert a direct influence on immunocompetent cells [2, 6, 13, 17, 20]. Only limited information is available on the influence of antibiotic treatment in vivo on parameters of the immune system [1, 2, 4–6, 10, 21–24]. Furthermore, the data obtained by different authors are controversial and hardly comparable. Whereas Gillissen [4, 5] described an augmenting effect of 1-day treament of mice with different β-laetam antibiotics on the primary humoral immune response against sheep erythrocytes, Roszkowski et al. [22, 23] found suppressive effects after 7 days of treatment. In this case mezlocillin and cefotaxime showed the most pronounced suppression of the humoral and cellular immune response. The difference between these studies might be due to differences induced by a prolonged action of antibiotics on immunocompetent cells, to differences in the action of antibiotics on the intestinal flora [7, 26, 27], to different stress situations of the mice [11, 15], induced for example by the different number of injections, or to different housing conditions [3, 7, 9]. The first hypothesis seems to be unlikely, because Büscher et al. [1] did not find a suppressive effect of 7-day treatment of Balb/c mice with mezlocillin.