FIG 5 .
Fluid replacement therapy inhibits vegetation formation and decreases bacterial burden. For fluid replacement, 25-ml volumes of sterile 0.9% saline solution were injected subcutaneously twice daily. (A) Bacterial counts per milliliter of blood recovered from the rabbits postmortem; (B) total weight of vegetations dissected from aortic valves after intravenous inoculation with 2 × 107 to 3 × 107 CFU of wild-type MW2; (C) bacterial counts recovered from aortic valve vegetations shown in panel B. **, P = 0.0074; *, P = 0.0312; nonparametric Mann-Whitney test. Horizontal lines and error bars represent mean values ± SEM. P values of ≤0.05 are considered statistically significant.