Word: herpesvirus
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Weller, who retired from his Harvard teaching responsibilities in 1980, went on to isolate and grow varicella-zoster viruses for chicken pox and shingles and cytomegalovirus, a member of the herpesvirus family that can cause birth defects. With the urine sample of his 10-year-old son Robert A. Weller, who developed a severe case of the measles, Weller and his Harvard colleague, Franklin A. Neva, identified the virus for rubella, or German measles...
Suspect Virus. A link between cervical cancer and poor hygiene, plus lack of circumcision, would be easier to explain if an infectious agent could be implicated. Researchers at Baylor University have found a suspect. It is a virus technically known as Herpesvirus hominis, Type II, closely related to the herpes virus, Type I, which causes fever blisters around the mouth. Type II infects the genital regions of both sexes; it is found in smegma, the secretion under the foreskin, and is readily transmitted during sexual contact...
...same virus that causes simple cold sores on the lip-herpesvirus-can also attack the surface of the eye; if unchecked, it can do damage that will scar the cornea, resulting in partial or complete blindness. The best treatment has hitherto proved successful in only 60% of cases, and the disease ranks as the commonest infection causing corneal scarring. Faced with cases that seemed beyond help, Dr. Bellows decided to try a cryoprobe chilled to a temperature...
...severe freezing, hypothesizes Dr. Bellows, "causes disruption of the infected cells. These disrupted cells release a high concentration of interferon," a natural virus fighter. Most of the herpesvirus is killed outright by the cold, and the interferon is able to stop the spread of whatever remains, eventually allowing it all to be killed. "The response to cryotherapy is so uniformly satisfactory," says Dr. Bellows, "that in unresponsive cases the physician should question the diagnosis and re-examine the patient...
Monkey Tricks. Other research under study at Bethesda raises the problem of ensuring the safety of any live-virus material grown in tissue cultures of monkeys' kidney cells. The kidneys of the monkey species used in vaccine manufacture are loaded with native viruses. The worst of these is Herpesvirus simiae, or "B virus," close kin to man's benign cold-sore virus. It apparently gives the monkey nothing worse than fever blisters; in man it is almost invariably fatal. In Salk vaccine these B virus particles were killed by formaldehyde, but in making an oral vaccine of live...
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