Abstract
Summary and Comment
Fourteen rabbits in a total of 28 developed neutralizing antibodies to the pneumonia virus of mice (PVM) either before or during the time they were under experiment in this laboratory. The appearance of these antibodies could not be correlated with the kind of material injected or with the development of antibodies to the atypical pneumonia virus 5 or to other agents. The incidence of antibodies to PVM was definitely higher in rabbits which had been kept in the laboratory for 2 to 10 months, and thus exposed to this agent carried by other rodents in active or latent form, than in normal rabbits newly received from an outside source or in those under experiment for a short interval of time. An agent related to PVM has been isolated from the lungs of apparently normal cotton rats, but as yet no attempt has been made to isolate a similar agent from rabbits. Human serums frequently contain neutralizing antibodies to PVM, 2 but an increase in these antibodies has not been observed. Although these results do not exclude the possibility that a virus antigenically related to PVM may be carried in the human respiratory tract, they do suggest that previous experiments 3 have failed to establish the relationship of such an agent to the virus isolated in our laboratory from persons with atypical pneumonia. 5
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