Re: pus
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From: | "J. A. Kiernan" <jkiernan@julian.uwo.ca> (by way of histonet) |
To: | histonet <histonet@magicnet.net> |
Reply-To: | |
Content-Type: | text/plain; charset="us-ascii" |
On Thu, 21 Jan 1999, Hawkins, Hal wrote:
> I would like to ask the group to try to clarify a question for me:
>
> Why is pus green?
An interesting question. When I worked as an abscess-incisor
and general dogsbody in a casualty department, I saw pus in
quite a range of colours: shades of green, yellow and almost
white (French Canadian pea soup, Coleman's English mustard and
clotted Devon cream, to use the pathologists' noble tradition
of likening the achievements of diseases to foods). Without
any serious study I thought that the coloured substances
were produced by the bacteria, probably because of Pseudomonas
pyocyanea, named fo its fluorescent blue-green pus. I never
saw such pus, but have seen the colour in the agar of bacterial
cultures, and also in contaminated tissue culture medium. This was
in 1968, and carbenicillin had just arrived on the market to
solve the problem.)
The myeloperoxidase/biliverdin suggestions also seem reasonable.
Proteins with peroxidase activity could generate coloured
products from all sorts of compounds that might find their way
into pus from either the causative bacteria or their suffering
host. All this is speculation. Some HistoNet suBsCriber is sure
to come up with hard facts to answer the simple but penetrating
question of why pus, though no longer laudable, is frequently
colourful.
John A. Kiernan,
Department of Anatomy & Cell Biology,
The University of Western Ontario,
LONDON, Canada N6A 5C1
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