Acute Respiratory Illness in Volunteers Following Intramuscular Administration of Live Adenovirus

Abstract

Early investigations of the pathogenicity of the adenoviruses (RI-APCARD agents) (1-5) for man revealed (3, 6, 7) that volunteers given tis- sue culture-grown virus by respiratory, intradermal, or intramuscular routes regularly developed neutralizing and complement-fixing antibodies against the agents without significant illness. This finding led us to attempt to prepare live virus vac- cine for human immunization employing types 4 and 7 adenovirus grown in tissue cultures of monkey kidney. When it was found (8, 9), however, that monkey kidney cultures may contain "wild" viruses of unknown pathogenicity for man, the idea of using such untreated monkey kidney material in volunteers was abandoned and a formalin-killed vaccine was prepared instead. The high degree of effectiveness of the killed vaccine in preventing acute respiratory illnesses caused by adenovirus in newly inducted soldiers has been reported elsewhere (10-12).