Show new disease with severe effects and very long name new yorka york A new disease which chic h may have affected as many as one out of every five adults in the country without their knowing what they had came in for discussion at the meeting of the american public health association here the disease has the jaw breaking name it Is caused by a virus in aboud about halt half the cases it causes fever and symptoms similar to influenza in the other halt half it affects the membranes that cover the brain and causes more severe symptoms such as bad headaches stiff neck nausea and and vomiting and even slight temporary paralysis so far no death has been reported in a proved case of this disease it Is difficult or impossible to distinguish this new disease by clinical means alone from another brain inflammation acute aseptic meningitis drs R D baird and tho thomas mas M rivers of the h hospital of the rockefeller institute for medical research pointed out its virus Is isolated the disease was discovered and its it Es virus isolated by drs charles C armstrong and R D lillie of the united states national institute of health they found the virus while studying viruses from st louis en epidemic patients in 1034 1934 two years before this Com commander Command mandez ci paul F dickens of the unibee states navy medical corps had re ported two cases of what looked alki acute aseptic meningitis but which he thought might be another disease caused by a virus since then the virus has been recovered from fr n m pa an and from monkeys mice m ice and other animals in this country eng land and F france rance diagnosis of the disease say dr armstrong drs baird and rivers and others who have studied it depends on examination of the spinal fluid and on a mouse protection test this consists in mixing the patients serum with the virus and injecting it into mice if the patient had the disease his blood would have antibodies in it that neutralize the virus in that case the mouse would remain well but it if the mouse gets sick it shows that the patients blood had no vi rus neutralizing antibodies and therefore that he did not have dr armstrong and associates made this test on blood from nearly 2000 well persons who were having routine blood tests for other reasons they found that among the adults almost 20 per cent ha had d neu antibodies in their blood although none of them recalled called being sick with symptoms of any brain or nerve disease the reason it has been missed in these patients Is probably because when it does docs not affect the brain it behaves so much like ilke influenza that it would be diagnosed as such |