Mercury battery ingestion.

laparotomyl or were examined post mortem.1314 An appreciable proportion of patients, however-140, in the Public Health Laboratory Service series9-had fresh blood, pus, or mucus in their stools, suggesting colorectal inflammation.The presence of proctitis in eight of the 11 patients in the present series suggested that colonic inflammation occurred commonly in those patients whose symptoms were severe enough to require hospital admission, and may have played an important part in producing the diarrhoea.It is accepted that infection with salmonella, shigella, or amoeba should be included in the differential diagnosis of irritable bowel disease, and our findings indicate that campylobacter should be considered.The changes seen on sigmoidoscopy and with a barium enema have little value in differentiating campylobacter colitis from irritable bowel disease, and, moreover, the histology of rectal biopsy specimens may show changes of this disease, thus compounding the problem.The importance of comprehensive bacteriological studies in all patients presenting with bloody diarrhoea cannot be overemphasised.Patients who in the past were diagnosed as having irritable bowel disease on clinical, sigmoidoscopic, and histological grounds may well have been suffering from unrecognised campylobacter colitis.sixth postoperative day.