Pneumocystis carinii in corticosteroid-treated voles: a comparison of three different staining methods

Pneumocystis carinii (PC) is an opportunistic pathogen which causes clinical disease in immunocompromised hosts. Three different staining protocols were employed to detect this organism in lung samples of corticosteroid treated voles in order to discover a suitable method for large-scale screening. The procedures employed were: Grocotts methenamine silver (GMS)-stained paraffin sections, toluidine blue O-stained impression smears, and methenamine-silver-stained frozen sections. GMS-stained paraffin sections were relatively easy to interpret and gave more positive results than the other methods. It seemed to be the satisfactory method for large-scale population analyses. An unexpected result was that methylprednisolone treatment did not induce in voles a similarly fatal pneumocystosis infection as occurred in rats. All infections found in voles were mild. This might be due to species-dependent differences in metabolizing methylprednisolone.