Design and evaluation of an aerosol infection chamber for small animals.

In this report, we describe the design of an aerosol exposure chamber to reproducibly produce uniformly distributed clouds of droplet nuclei. The device can deliver desired number of bacilli (20-2000) in lungs of mice. All safety measures to handle infectious bacteria have been incorporated in the design and it is controlled remotely by a personal computer. It is an indispensable device to study the protective efficacy of vaccine candidates against Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection. This device would also be useful to study immunization and drug delivery by nasal route in experimental animals.