Pseudoparasitism of the human intestinal tract.

For the past ten years we have been examining about two hundred samples of human stools annually for protozoal parasites. The specimens were collected in a psychiatric ward; suitable material was used for a course of instruction in tropical medicine. The third of May, 1944, in four out of thirteen specimens, structures were found resembling cysts, of a type never seen in human stools before, neither in Holland nor in Java. Afterwards we never saw them again, either in specimens from other patients or in those of the patients who had produced them on the third of May. On closer examination and after a study of the literature, they were found to be very much like young o6cysts of Eimeria debliecki, the intestinal coccidium of the pig. They are figured in text-figure I.