Virus Diseases

Primitive peoples believed that evil spirits carried diseases. Hebrews and Greeks proved that cleanliness protected them from many ailments. In the Middle Ages doctors ascribed to various invisible contagia the causes of diseases. In 1658 by means of a simple microscope Athanasius Kircher of Fulda, Germany, saw "worms" in the blood of people stricken with Black Plague. Those probably were the first germs ever noted. As microscopes were improved more kinds of animalcula were observed, and doctors gradually associated them with disease. But not until 1876 was a germ proved to be a cause of a disease. The disease: anthrax in cattle. The germ: Bacillus anthracis. The discoverer: Robert Koch (1843-1910).

Pathologists estimate that there are 742 organisms responsible for the diseases which afflict man & beast. Of the diseases which men are known to contract, 123 are due to bacteria (e. g., diphtheria), 95 to worms (e. g., trichinosis), 81 to fungi (e. g., athlete's' foot), 71 to insects (e. g., scabies), 56 to protozoa (e. g., malaria), 13 to spirochetes (e. g., syphilis) and five to Rickettsia (e. g., rocky mountain spotted fever). Affiliated with these nefarious swarms are 25 scarcely identifiable "inclusion bodies" or Chlamydozoa which cause a bracket of diseases including smallpox, rabies, parrot fever.

Chlamydozoa are so small that they filter through the pores of unglazed porcelain. Filterable likewise, and invisible by means of the most potent microscopes yet invented, are 25 other substances which are known to cause specific diseases (infantile paralysis, common cold, mumps) and 21 substances which are presumed to cause in man scarlet fever, trachoma, encephalitis, influenza, measles, German measles, multiple sclerosis, psoriasis, venereal warts.

Those 71 filterable substances are called viruses. Bacteriologists can cultivate them. With them pathologists can cause disease in all living creatures and plants. Immunologists can use them to prevent diseases. But precisely what they are constitutes one of Medicine's greatest contemporary problems.

Last week investigators of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research believed that they were on the heels of the final answer to the great virus question: Are viruses living entities like germs but too small to be seen and identified by means of microscopes? Or are they enzymes, like pepsin, which stimulate biochemical changes in the body? Or are they simply complex nonliving chemicals which cause particular trouble to the body?

Dr. Wendell M. Stanley of the Rockefeller Institute recently crystallized a virus. Since crystallization is a distinctive peculiarity of nonliving substances, Dr. Stanley's work indicates that viruses are proteins which, while lifeless, lie very close to the margin of life.

Practically as momentous was another report by other Rockefeller Institute investigators in the Journal of Experimental Medicine. Drs. Christopher Howard Andrewes and Richard Edwin Shope found that a virus which affects rabbits changes its effects for no known cause. Some inoculations cause tumors, some inflammation. If the same virus can cause one result in one creature and another result in another creature, possibly other viruses mutate likewise.

Last week Dr. Shope appeared to be the first recognized victim of a new virus which affects the meningeal covering of the brain.

Dr. Shope suffered his attack in December 1934, just before his 33rd birthday. At the time he was investigating several virus diseases of animals at the Rockefeller Institute's Princeton laboratories. He first diagnosed his indisposition as grippe. When it did not yield to household remedies and rest, he went to a hospital where specialists decided that he I suffered from influenza, tumor of the ; brain, or cerebral inflammation.

The staff of the Rockefeller Institute, whose jobs are to deal with the causes of virulent diseases, are eternally vigilant against tragedies such as seemed to have overtaken young Dr. Shope. He was transferred to the Institute's hospital in Manhattan, where fluid was drained from his spine. This procedure relieved the pressure on his brain, eased his most distressing symptoms. In seven weeks he was out of the hospital, in five months completely cured of an infection of the brain, all without taking any specific medicine because the cause of his infection was unknown.

While Dr. Shope was recovering, Drs.

Thomas Milton Rivers and Thomas Frederick McNair Scott of the Rockefeller Institute searched his spinal fluid for the infection's cause. They ruled out viruses of infantile paralysis, sleeping sickness, shingles and mumps, which sometimes cause identical symptoms. Finally they reached the conclusion which they published in the Journal of Experimental Medicine last week that Dr. Shope had experienced an attack of a hitherto unknown virus disease.

Virus diseases last week had an abnormally strong grip on the U. S. Scarlet fever, rising steadily since Thanksgiving, had caused more illness than in all recorded U. S. history. The incidence of influenza was the highest since the winter of 1933.

Because the effects of influenza vary from year to year and hit victims in different ways, doctors suspect that there may be more than one kind of influenza virus. To that suspicion Drs. Horace Pettit, Stuart Mudd & Dickinson Sergeant Pepper of the University of Pennsylvania gave this answer in last week's American Medical Association Journal: "The virus that has been the primary etiologic agent of human influenza in widely separated areas of the world during recent years would appear to be a single immunologic entity. . . . Immunization of susceptible animals against this virus has been shown to be possible. These facts should offer profound encouragement for the ultimate control of this last and greatest uncontrolled pestilence."

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