Diagnosis is difficult in patients who complain of slight fever without objective abnormalities. It is not rare that patients without signs of typical Mycobacterium tuberculosis (TB) infection have a delayed TB diagnosis. It has been reported that the QuantiFERON TB-2G test is useful for diagnosing latent TB infection. We report a patient who suffered from sweating, body weight loss, and a fever of less than 37.5C without abnormalities in routine tests. Except for his complaints, only QuantiFERON TB-2G testing suggested his illness, after which he was successfully treated with isoniazid administration. QuantiFERON TB-2G testing might be useful to diagnose patients with slight fever when TB is suspected but a conventional workup is not diagnostic.

During the past four years authors encountered a total of 25 tourists suffered from cerebral (CI: 14 cases) and acute myocardial infarction (AMI: 11 cases) while staying in Kusatsu Hot Spring. The subjects consisted of 13 males and 12 females, ranging from 49 to 85 years old (mean 68±9.5). Analytical study relating to the time of onset of diseases, bathing, drinking and others was performed in these patients. The results obtained were as follows.
1) Higher incidence was observed from May to October in CI, while from March to April and in September in AMI. A majority of the subjects suffered from CI or AMI within two days after arrival in Kusatsu. Attack occurred during bathing in one subject, within six hours after bathing in one, and from six to 24 hours after bathing in the others, respectively. Furthermore, a hourly distribution of the onset of disease showed the high incidence of CI between 3:00 and 9:00, and of AMI between 21:00 and 0:00.
2) Bathing was done one to four times within 24 hours before onset in all subjects. Meanwhile, drinking was in 56% of the subjects.
3) Out of 21 subjects investigated six cases were under medication with hypotensive drugs.
From the results above described, a role of bathing playing in pathogenetic mechanism in thrombotic diseases such as CI and AMI was briefly discussed.

We investigated the effects of artificial mineral bathing in water containing sodium sulfate and sodium bicarbonate on venous blood gas, blood pressure, heart rate, and deep body temperature in 10 patients with hypertension or history of hypertension. After a 10-minute bathing at 40°C, the parameters described above were carefully checked. The pH and P_O2 levels in venous blood increased and the P_CO2 level decreased after the artificial mineral bathing in comparison with plain water bathing. However, these changes were not statistically significant. The systolic blood pressure tended to decrease up to 10 hours after the artificial mineral bathing. The heart rate markedly reduced after the artificial mineral bathing and remained at a low level for 10 hours. The deep body temperature began to decrease 40 minutes after the artificial mineral bathing. However, it increased over the base-line level 6 hours later. From the above result, it is considered that artificial mineral bathing is useful for patients with hypertension.