Recovery of Viruses in Chronic CNS Disease

To the Editor: We are writing to clarify a conclusion made by Weiner, Johnson and Herndon in their article, “Viral Infections and Demyelinating Disease” (288:1103–1110, 1973). Specifically, they conclude that canine distemper is different from postinfectious encephalomyelitis and SSPE, because “virus is readily isolated from the brain even in [dogs with] chronic Central-nervous-system disease.”” They cite the work of Lincoln et al. (Pathol Vet 8:1–8, 1971), but these workers clearly stated on page 6 of their report that the disease was not transmitted to dogs or ferrets and viruses were not isolated in vitro. We wish to make this clarification ….