THE IDENTIFICATION OF NEGISHI VIRUS A PRESUMABLY NEW MEMBER OF RUSSIAN SPRING-SUMMER ENCEPHALITIS VIRUS FAMILY ISOLATED IN JAPAN (original) (raw)

Abstract

In the summer of 1948, a virus was isolated in Tokyo City from the cerebrospinal fluid of a patient who was clinically diagnosed as Japanese B encephalitis. The isolation was done by Ando et al. (1952) employing the intracerebral (i. c.) inoculation into adult mice. Since the virus showed no immunological overlap with Nakayama strain of Japanese B, it was thought that this might be a mutant of Japanese B. Later in the same year, another successful isolation was made again from an autopsied patient's brain which was termed as Strain K-13 (Ando et al., 1, 952) . According to marked similarities in biological and i mmunol ogical characteristics, Negishi and K-13 have been considered to be identical with each other.
A case of laboratory infection occurred in 1950, which was manifested not with an overt encephalitis but with fever. Subsequently there have been a number of studies (Honda, 1951) directed toward the serological identification of this virus; however, most of them ended eventually in an equivocal or inconclusive results. Hence, in our laboratory, it was decided to carry out the identification once again with the latest serological techniques. The present paper decribes how this virus was identified as a prsumably new member of tick-borne arbor virus. This is the first report demonstrating the presence in Japan of virus of the Russian Spring-Summer Encephalities (RSSE) family.