“…The kinetics and specificity of many of the antibody responses have been characterized in human infection (Mote and Jones, 1941;Rothbard et al, 1948;Stollerman et al, 1956;Denny et al, 1957). In the susceptible host, autoreactivity of this response (in particular crossreacting anti-M protein antibody) may contribute to the pathogenesis of acute rheumatic fever (Kaplan and Svec, 1964;Zabriskie et al, 1970;Krisher and Cunningham, 1985;Cunningham et al, 1989).…”