A specimen of stool containing fly larvae may be incubated in a moist chamber in order to obtain the imago for species determination.
CHAPTER LI
THE JOINTS, BONES AND MUSCLES IN TROPICAL DIAGNOSIS
In considering the diagnostic significance of bone and joint manifestations of tropical diseases, it is essential that the practitioner in the tropics bear in mind the cosmopolitan arthropathies.
It should be remembered that lesions of joints may accompany or follow almost all infectious diseases, and that it is often impossible to ascertain if the lesions be due to the actual presence of organisms within the joint or to the action of toxic substances elaborated elsewhere; so that infectious arthritis is broadly defined as arising from the presence within the body of a focus of infection. This definition is further expanded to include joint affections of intestinal origin, and also those in which neither the causal organism nor its focus of origin is discoverable, but which by analogy we unhesitatingly recognize as being due to an infective agent.
It is to be noted that the lesions of arthritis may develop either in the intra-articular membranes or in the bony parts adjacent to a joint, and that they may remain confined to their primary site or eventually extend to involve other tissues.
Infectious Arthritis
A. Of known etiology.
May be acute or chronic. Examples are: Gonorrhoea, typhoid, tuberculosis, bacillary dysentery, pneumococcus infections, pyogenic cocci, filariasis, Malta fever, secondary to any recognized focus.
B. Of unknown etiology.