Abstract
THE extermination of the polecat in Great Britain was carried out with deplorable success in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It is fortunate for the progress of knowledge that it survived in the domesticated form of the ferret, which was of immense service in solving the problem of the cause and prevention of dog distemper, and now promises to be of equal value in studying human influenza. The facts so far ascertained at the National Institute for Medical Research at Hampstead are not conclusive but they are certainly very suggestive. Dr. P. P. Laidlaw, Dr. C. H. Andrewes and Dr. W. Smith have found that washings from the noses of human cases of influenza, after passing through a bacteria-proof filter, cause a characteristic febrile and catarrhal attack when instilled, into the noses of ferrets, which by similar means can be carried on to other ferrets in series. No other animal which has been tried is susceptible in the same way, and no other method of inoculation will infect the ferret—so much does progress rest on technique. Recovered ferrets are immune and their blood will neutralise the infective material, as will the blood of human-beings who have passed through an attack. The facts-fit in well with the idea that uncomplicated human influenza is relatively a trivial disease and that when the cyclical epidemics fall in the summer months they attract no great attention: if they come in the winter they give a severe affection with a substantial mortality due to the secondary invasion of the lungs by Pfeiffer's bacillus, streptococci and perhaps pneum-ococci. In the ‘influenza’ of pigs studied by Shope in America, the virus causing the primary disease is of practical importance only because it allows in fection by the secondary bacillus.
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Research on Influenza. Nature 133, 353 (1934). https://doi.org/10.1038/133353c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/133353c0