Children, Virus & Cancer

Now that traditional infectious diseases of children are so well controlled, one of the commonest causes of death among U.S. children is acute leukemia. It appears most often between the ages of two and five, and it accounts for about a third of all childhood cancers. Though it affects cells of the lymphatic system, it rarely causes solid tumors and is regarded as a "cancer of the blood." What connection can this possibly have with a hideously deforming and quick-killing cancer of the jaw that afflicts African children? Researchers now think they know. The African disease offers the best chance to date of proving a relationship between a virus and a form of human cancer, and may help to explain why American leukemia cases sometimes appear in clusters--a phenomenon that has led to suspicions of an infectious element in leukemia.

Geographically Interesting. The link between these two seemingly unrelated diseases is suggested in the A.M.A. Journal by Dr. Gilbert Dalldorf of Manhattan's Sloan-Kettering Institute. In equatorial Africa, he points out, at least 40% of all childhood cancers are lymphatic, but they rarely take the form of leukemia and are almost invariably solid tumors. They are usually seen first in the jawbones (though they also attack other bones and internal organs) of children aged three to eight.

What makes the African tumors especially interesting to researchers is their geography. They occur clear across the continent, and down the east coast as far as Lourenc,o Marques. Since they are found in children of all races, their cause is not likely to lie in ethnic factors. But there are two cutoffs: the tumors do not occur in children living above about 5,000 ft., or in areas with less than 20 in. of annual rainfall. The map of African tumor occurrence, with its highland islands of tumor-free children, almost matches the maps for yellow fever and one form of sleeping sickness.

Bunyamwera Trial. To Uganda's Professor Jack N. P. Davies, this suggested that the children's cancers might be caused, or at least triggered, by a mosquito-borne virus. Now British investigators in jungle-edge laboratories are performing delicate experiments to isolate such a virus from the cancers. But the region is a rich source of competing and often confusing viruses. Ironically, one of these, named Bunyamwera (after a Uganda district), has been tried experimentally as a treatment for cancer. It was a cluster of leukemia cases among children in the Chicago suburb of Niles, Ill. (TIME, June 2, 1961), that backed up the suggestion of a viral role in the lymphatic leukemia of American children.

For all their superficial differences, Dr. Dalldorf notes, the diseases have two important factors in common. The tumor cells are of the same type, and both diseases can be slowed down, or arrested for a year or two, by the same radiation and drug treatment. (Sloan-Kettering medical teams have gone to Kenya and treated many patients there.) So, suggests Dr. Dalldorf, the lymphatic cancers of children, in Africa and elsewhere, may be two sides of the same coin.

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