Mycoplasmas and ovine keratoconjunctivitis.

The clinical course of an outbreak of keratoconjunctivitis in housed lambs and their dams was followed. Signs were transient generally and became severe in only a small proportion of lambs. The outbreak became most obvious when the lambs were 46 to 55 days old, when 46.

The experimental infection of specific pathogen free lambs with Mycoplasma ovipneumoniae.

Six colostrum-deprived SPF lambs inoculated endobronchially with a second passage broth culture of a Scottish strain of Mycoplasma ovipneumoniae, were killed in batches of two at seven, 14 and 28 days post-inoculation. One lamb from each batch showed macroscopic and microscopic lung lesions similar to but milder than those described for respiratory mycoplasmoses in other species of animals and exhibited minor clinical symptoms. Mycoplasma were recovered from all infected but from no control animals: five infected lambs yielded mycoplasma from lung tissue.

The comparison and characterisation of glycolytic mycoplasmas isolated from the respiratory tract of sheep.

Nine strains of glycolytic mycoplasmas isolated from the respiratory tract of apparently healthy sheep, pneumonic sheep and sheep with pulmonary adenomatosis (SPA) were compared with a Queensland strain (Y98) of Mycoplasma ovipneumoniae. All strains were very similar in their reactions in 14 biochemical tests and in their sensitivities to optochin, digitonin, sodium polyanethol sulphonate, and 11 antibiotics. Polyacrylamide-gel electrophoresis and serological cross-reactions by the agar-gel double diffusion, metabolic inhibition (MI) and growht-inhibition (GI) tests also showed that all strains could be classified as M.