Getting Hep

Already this year more than 50,000 cases of infectious hepatitis have been reported to the U.S. Public Health Service--more than double the number recorded a year ago, and more than the total for the entire record year of 1954. Breaking records before it even hits peak season in late fall, infectious hepatitis is mysteriously appearing and disappearing in city and hamlet, hopscotching the map in a manner that leaves epidemiologists at a loss for cogent explanation. Equally frustrated are the physicians who are trying to treat it, using gamma globulin to help prevent it. and ACTH and cortisone-like drugs to treat the symptoms in some severe cases.

Through the years, the hope has been to develop a vaccine. If the guilty virus strains could be isolated and injected in a nonvirulent form into the body, natural immunizing forces could go to work, produce antibodies, protect against the disease. But in trying to isolate the virus, laboratory scientists have been faced with a forbidding problem. They could obtain the virus from infected persons, mixed up with tissue, feces, and other microscopic and submicroscopic organisms, but there seemed to be no way of bringing about a mechanical or chemical separation.

This week in the A.M.A. Journal, a team of Detroit and Chicago researchers, headed by Parke, Davis Virologist Wilton A. Rightsel announced that viruses capable of producing hepatitis in man had been isolated. By carefully regulating temperature, alkalinity and acidity, the researchers had managed to isolate several strains of virus, grow them in tissue culture. What is more, they were able to focus an electron microscope on the viruses, magnify them 53,000 times, and take their picture.

Another team of researchers, headed by Northwestern University's Dr. Joseph Boggs, has used some of the Parke, Davis viruses to inject into prisoner-volunteers at Illinois State Penitentiary and produce a form of hepatitis.

Other virologists, mindful that liver inflammation may be caused by many agents, hopefully awaited further evidence that their colleagues had indeed found viral culprits in a disease that now ranks as one of the U.S.'s most serious infectious-disease problems.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.