Coxsackie Viruses and Bornholm Disease

Abstract

In the United States of America and in Canada viruses have been isolated which have been called Coxsackie viruses, from the village of Coxsackie in New York State, where the first known patients resided. The patients from whose stools, blood, or nasal washings the viruses have been obtained have been variously diagnosed as cases of non-paralytic poliomyelitis (Dalldorf and Sickles, 1948 ; Dalldorf et al, 1949, Jaworski and West, 1949), summer grippe (Melnick et al, 1950), or epidemic myalgia (Curnen et al, 1949). In Canada, Armstrong et al. (1950) have isolated the virus from the stools of three children from whom typical poliomyelitis virus was also recovered, from adults in contact with these children, and from a child suffering from a Guillain-Barr? syndrome with an ascending Landry type of paralysis. In some cases both a poliomyelitis and a Coxsackie virus have thus been isolated from the stools of the same patient. The Coxsackie viruses have been isolated not only from stools, blood, and throat swabs, but from sewage and flies. There seem to be at least five strains of Coxsackie virus present in the United States of America (Howitt and Benefield, 1950) : these viruses can be differentiated by a complement-fixation reaction as well as by the neutralizing effect of specific virucidal antibodies. The Coxsackie viruses are transmissible only to suckling mice and hamsters, which develop paralysis after an incuba tion period which may be as short as 48 hours. The muscles of infected mice and hamsters exhibit a proliferation of the cells of the sarcolemma sheaths with loss of striation in the muscle fibres : all the voluntary muscles of the body, as well as the diaphragm, show similar changes. In this country there have been available to us one of the strains isolated in Connecticut by Melnick et al. (1949), and three strains known as Dalldorf viruses 1, 2, and 3. We are indebted to Professor Sven Gard, of Stockholm, Dr. F. O. MacCallum, and Dr. J. A. Dudgeon for these viruses. A Laboratory Infection