Failure to Neutralize the Poliomyelitis Virus With Sera of Adult Macacus Rhesus and of Young Female Rhesus Treated With Anterior Pituitary Extracts

Abstract

The usual conception of the epidemiology of poliomyelitis is that man is relatively resistant to the disease, that the virus is commonly transmitted from and to the nasopharynx and is more widely distributed than is evidenced by clinical records, and that the general population is largely immunized by these factors of host resistance and parasite distribution. Difficulty of direct experimental proof of these principles lies in the fact that the virus is not cultivable by bacteriological methods and hence is dependent upon animal inoculation for its demonstration. By the use of this method, however, the virus has been recovered in non-clinical cases in a few instances (1). Several more indirect types of evidence are available to support the classic conception, but the one we are here concerned with is the power of the serum of certain adults without history of poliomyelitis to neutralize the virus, a property which has been assumed to be due, by analogy with other diseases, to subclinical infections with the causative agent.The view that such an assumption is not entirely tenable has been expressed by Jungeblut and Engle, who suggest that "resistance to poliomyelitis . . . . is predominantly a function of normal physiological maturation and to a large extent seems to develop independently of previous contact with the specific antigen" (2a).

Immunization Against Poliomyelitis

“…Jungeblut There are discrepancies between these two sets of data in regard to the neutralization tests in the early stages, but it seems clear that the neutralizing agent appears in the serum of monkeys in response to the infection, even though its appearance is delayed. Uninoculated rhesus monkeys were found to remain seronegative regardless of age (32,33), in contrast to the serologic pattern found in the general human population.…”