NATURE OF SKIN REACTIONS PRODUCED BY HEATINACTIVATED POLIOMYELITIS VIRUS

Abstract

The purpose of the present investigation was to determine whether or not persons who had recovered from poliomyelitis or those who are generally considered resistant to it possess any cutaneous allergy to the heat-inactivated virus of the disease. Our aim, obviously, was to devise a skin test which would differentiate between susceptibility and resistance to poliomyelitis on a specific immunologic basis. Although there are no known manifestations of the human disease which suggest the operation of an allergic mechanism, the extensive study of experimental poliomyelitis in monkeys has brought forth various observations for which hypersensitiveness or allergy to the virus has been considered as one of the possible explanations by certain investigators.¹ Recently, one of us (C. W. J.²) showed that monkeys that have recovered from experimental poliomyelitis respond with an accelerated rise of temperature to an intracranial or subcutaneous injection of the virus, and interpreted this phenomenon