Fatal Anaphylactic Shock

Deaths related to the injection of foreign protein in man are fortunately few. The exact number of such occurrences is difficult to estimate from the available literature. By 1942 Kojis1was able to find 61 such deaths, and he added 4 more from the Willard Parker Hospital. The most complete and most recent study of necropsies was made by Vance and Strassmann,2who added 7 autopsy studies from the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner to 19 taken from the literature. Park3in 1932 recorded the mortality from serum anaphylaxis as 0.002 per cent. Kojis1in 1942 found it to be just under 0.1 per cent in a series of 6,211 subjects treated for various infections. Rutstein and his associates,4in their analysis of pneumonia cases treated with antipneumococcus horse serum, found the mortality to be 0.45 per cent. In only 1 or possibly 2