Word: viruses
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...summer people get encephalitis ("sleeping sickness") and poliomyelitis ("infantile paralysis"). In the winter people get sore throats, running noses, influenza. The fact that there are no pandemics of colds in the summer or infantile paralysis in the winter set Dr. Charles Armstrong, virus expert of the U. S. Public Health Service, to thinking. It set him thinking even harder when mice, inoculated with sleeping sickness virus, died just as often at temperatures of 42° F. as they did at temperatures of 95° F. Since sleeping sickness and infantile paralysis both enter the body through the nose, Dr. Armstrong...
...flight Boston physicians began at once to investigate the relation of human encephalitis to equine encephalomyelitis, and last week, in the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. LeRoy Dryden Fothergill and associates* announced that, for the first time, from a case of human encephalitis, they had isolated a virus which was identical with the eastern strain of equine encephalomyelitis virus. A few days later, in Science, Pathologists Leslie Tillotson Webster and F. Howell Wright of Manhattan's Rockefeller Institute confirmed the findings of the Boston physicians and described four similar cases...
...method of identifying the virus was simple: suspensions of brain tissue taken from fatal human cases were injected into the brains of young Swiss mice. Two days later the mice showed "ruffled fur, slowing of activity, alternating with convulsive twitchings," and other symptoms similar to those of equine encephalomyelitis...
Some were killed and samples of their brain tissue were injected into other healthy mice, which fell sick in two days and died. The virus also worked on monkeys, guinea pigs, rabbits. Typical of eastern equine encephalomyelitis was the two-day incubation period, as well as the violent symptoms which are unique and completely different from those occurring in human beings. As a further check, however, they injected deadly doses of the virus into animals which had been immunized against eastern equine virus. All these remained "perfectly well...
Next experiments will probably test the power of Dr. Wyckoff's chick vaccine to confer immunity on human beings. Further research may also determine whether some equine virus is responsible for a large proportion of human encephalitis...