pus cell

Neutrophils do not return to the blood; they turn into pus cells and die.

But concentrating all attention on the pus cells, as researchers have done for the past 20 years, is perhaps to miss the most important elements of process.

It is these cases, where no pathogen can be isolated yet there are pus cells to be found in the urethra, that major problems of diagnosis arise.

Pus cells are obvious in discharges from infected sites - even in a rheumatoid arthritic knee a thousand million may enter an inflamed joint in a day.

At least with the man, a urethritis can be diagnosed, albeit imperfectly, by noticing pus cells in the urethra, but the same criteria cannot be applied to the woman.

We know from animal experiments that if there were no lymphocytes there would be no inflammation and no pus, despite normal numbers of pus cells in the body.

Nucleic acids were originally discovered in 1868 by Friedrich Meischer, a Swiss biologist, who isolated DNA from pus cells on bandages.

Nobody would claim that these pus cells are evidence of continuing infection, rather that they are evidence of resolving inflammation and as such are not appropriately treated with antibiotics.

It is even possible (and I suspect that many 'relapses' fall into t his category) that the pus cells do not represent active infection and are a residual sign of past or resolving infection.

At the time, Hoppe-Seyler was intensely interested in research concerning an acidic substance that had first been chemically isolated from pus cells by one of his former students, Friedrich Miescher, in 1869.

Recent studies have questioned the distinction between categories Ⅲa and Ⅲb, since both categories show evidence of inflammation if pus cells are ignored and other more subtle signs of inflammation, like cytokines, are measured.

However, the patient is likely to continue coughing for some time after the antibiotics have been stopped, and the sputum that is produced when the patient coughs will be found to contain numerous pus cells on microscopic examination.

The white cells from the blood, the polymorphonuclear leucocytes or 'pus cells', which are responsible for scavenging and consuming unwelcome intruders in the body, can be seen to have phagocytosed, or eaten, the bacteria, which thus become 'intracellular'.

As far as the male is concerned, this might not matter too much were it not for the fact that some of these cases of NSU or 'pus cells in the urethra' may very well not be manifestations of infection.

If a patient returns after a prolonged course of antibiotic therapy and is still found to be harbouring the ubiquitous pus cell in the urethra, then it may well be that he has reinfected himself from his, as yet untreated, sexual partner.

Although Albert Neisser is credited with the discovery, in 1879, of the causative bacterium,Neisseria gonorrhoeae, which bears his name, seven years previously Hallier had noticed the presence of micro-organisms in the pus cells of gonococcal discharge.

And it is surely no coincidence that it was soon after his initial relocation to Italy that bodies swarmed into his art, mostly in the form of detached sexual organs as absurd as cartoons and as scary as cancer pus cells.

Whole networks of macrophages stimulate lymphocytes to control other lymphocytes which stimulate macrophages; special factors attract other cells, including pus cells, into the area; and proteins called complement are also produced that can act alone or with antibody to make bacteria much more easily absorbed.