Coxsackie & ECHO

The Salk vaccine against paralytic polio may be even more effective than the statistics have shown. Since wide-scale vaccination began in 1955, there have been hundreds of reported cases of paralysis among people who had had one or two shots (only a handful among those who had had three). But in last week's A.M.A. Journal, a University of Pittsburgh team headed by Dr. William McD. Hammon

(TIME, Nov. 3, 1952) reported evidence that casts doubt on these figures.

Difficulty is that the poliomyelitis virus belongs to a family of at least three enteroviruses (so called because they can multiply in the gut) that sometimes cause no detectable illness, but at other times attack the nervous system. Doctors used to think that the only one of the three capable of causing paralysis was the virus of polio itself. This may not be so, say Hammon and colleagues. After studying six patients who were immunized against polio with gamma globulin in prevaccine days and then developed a paralytic disease that was mistaken for polio, they now suggest that the guilty viruses were of the Coxsackie group (named for the Hudson Valley town where the first one was isolated) or the ECHO group (named for enteric cytopathogenic human orphan). Concludes the A.M.A.: Viruses probably also have been responsible for some post-vaccination cases of paralysis, which therefore were not polio at all.

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