Prospects for Preventing the Association of Harmful Bacteria with Host Mucosal Surfaces

Abstract

The notion that bacteria which inhabit or infect the body surfaces of a metazoan host, must somehow ‘stick’ to these surfaces in order to avoid physical removal, is exceedingly simple and intuitively obvious. An analogous concept has been generally accepted for many decades by marine biologists. It is therefore difficult to explain why this idea — and especially its experimental exploration in medical bacteriology — had remained confined to isolated esoteric studies until only a few years ago. Indeed, the published literature contains few relevant references until the early 1960’s when, among other contributions, the concept was formulated on theoretical grounds (Dixon, 1960; Lankford, 1960; Freter et al, 1961 ; Smith and Halls, 1967), when colonization of body surfaces was demonstrated histologically (La Brec et al., 1965; Dubos et al., 1965; Hoffman and Frank, 1966) and when the protective effect of local immunity was correlated with inhibition of adhesion (Freter, 1969). In spite of the mounting evidence, the current ‘explosion’ of interest in the role of bacterial adherence in host—parasite interactions of body surfaces did not take place until well into the 1970’s. It is fascinating to speculate what circumstance suddenly motivated so many workers to study bacterial adhesion to host tissues. Most likely, responsibility for this trend cannot be assigned solely to any single precipitating cause, but the prolific and provocative publications of Gibbons and associates must have contributed to it in a major way. These workers demonstrated a close association between adhesive capacity and in vivo distribution of a variety of oral bacteria (reviewed by Gibbons and van Houte, 1975).