[Psittacosis as a cause of acute respiratory distress syndrome (author's transl)].

Diagnosis of acute, primary extensive pneumopathies provoking severe hypoxemia is particularly difficult, became of the non-specific radiological findings, resulting from the oedema and associated alveolar collapse, and the fact that the clinical picture and biological test results are not very characteristic of a particular etiology. Similar findings may be obtained, therefore, in bacterial pneumopathies so-called typical pulmonary affections, certain forms of acute, tuberculosis, and other types of infection of three patients admitted for acute respiratory insufficiency, two died after treatment with a betalactamine, alone or associated with an aminoside, subsequent serology providing evidence of psittacosis. Diagnosis was immediately established in the third patient, the wife of one of the other cases, and she recovered after erythromycin treatment. The lungs of the two patients that died showed suggestive bronchiolitis and peribronchiolar alveolitis, together with obliterative alveolar granulations and fibrosis, probably secondary to the psittacosis, and responsible for the fatal outcome. Psittacosis as a cause of an extensive pneumopathy of probable infectious origin may easily pass unrecognized, typical etiologies being infections due to pneumococcus, Legionella pneumophila. Mycoplasma pneumoniae, and viruses. Erythromycin, active against these microorganisms, would therefore appear to be the antibiotic therapy that should be prescribed initially, those with wider spectrums being reserved for cases with atypical radiological findings, or when precise bacteriological data is available.