A SEROLOGICAL SURVEY FOR ANTIBODIES AGAINST HERPES SIMPLEX VIRUS WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO COMPARATIVELY HEAT-LABILE COMPLEMENT-FIXING ANTIBODIES

Abstract

The demonstration by Andrewes and Carmichael (1930) that a majority of human population possessed antibodies against herpes virus opened a way to a number of follow-up investigations, and the total body of data accumulated has supported the essence of the postulate of Burnet and Williams (1939) that the primary infections, either apparent or inapparent, might occur mostly in childhood and result in a commensal host-parasite relation lasting for the rest of life with or without occasional manifestations such as recurrent herpes. The earlier workers, employing neutralization test (Weyer, 1932; Burnet and Lush, 1939; Scott et al., 1952; Buddingh et al., 1953; Tateno et al., 1958), complement fixation test (Hayward, 1950: Holzel et al., 1953; Yamaguchi, 1959a) or both (Dascomb et al., 1955; Yamaguchi, 1955b; Schmidt and Lennette, 1961), found antibodies among 60 to 100 per cent of the adult populations examined. It was also a common observation that newborn babies less than four months old showed the same positive ratio as adults but after this period a markedly low positive ratio was observed up to the age of two years.The purpose of our investigation was to obtain further inf ormations concerning (1) the distribution of antibodies in various age groups especially among children less than ten years old, and (2) the correlation between the neutralizing and complementfixing antibodies, on the basis of analysis with a large number of serum samples. Usually, a difficulty facing such an attempt is the cumbersome manipulation required for the neutralization test. However, this was overcome by the application of the simple one-day egg neutralization technique (Yoshino et al., 1959) .The pattern of antibody distribution obtained as a result of this study appeared to differ in some respects from previous surveys performed in this country (Tateno et al., 1958; Yamaguchi, 1959a, 1959b), suggesting perhaps an environmental improvement. In addition, the finding of comparatively heat-labile complement-fixing antibodies seemed noteworthy. The preset report summarizes and analyses these results.