Abstract
Summary
Children ingesting vacuolating SV-40 virus, a member of the papova group, may excrete virus in their stools. When 100 to 1000 PFU of vacuolating virus present as a contaminant of oral poliovaccine, were fed to 3- to 6-month-old infants, some of them excreted vacuolating virus for 4 weeks. Vacuolating virus seemed to interfere to some degree with the multiplication of poliovirus, for SV-40 carriers excreted less poliovirus and for shorter periods than did those children who did not become infected by the vacuolating virus. Two groups of newborn infants receiving large doses of SV-40 were also studied, and in one group vacuolating virus was found to be excreted for as long as 5 weeks. No disease attributable to SV-40 occurred in any of these children, nor has illness been recorded for any of the hundreds of thousands or millions who have either been injected or been fed with this agent.
Consideration should be given to the cationic treatment of oral poliovaccines. Such treatment stabilizes the vaccine virus and at the same time can remove SV-40 and other hypothetical agents which may be present but which have not been detected by present testing methods.
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