BIOS 111 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Umbilical Cord, Tetanospasmin, Tetanus
Document Summary
People would get spores of tetanospasmin by bullet wounds. The muscles contract, causing the victim to die from exhaustion. It"s a type of paralysis where all muscles are contracted. Clostridium tetani is gram-positive, rod-shaped, anaerobic, and spore-forming. It doesn"t spread person-to-person, but by wounds. Any place with large numbers of horses is flooded with tetanus. It"s common in dirt, soil, and manure. Tetanus bacterial spores get in through wounds, get into the bloodstream, and then get delivered to the brain. When reaching the brain, it infects the neurons. Clostridium tetani produces neurotoxin because it targets nerves. The dangerous element is the exotoxin that"s produced by the vegetative cell, not the spore itself. The spore is just a survival structure, it doesn"t infect. It germinates and those cells are what produce the toxin. We produced the toxoid as a vaccine. We took the protein, modified it with hcho, and created a toxoid. A sequence of shots builds up antigens.
