Roundabout Vaccination

The trouble with many live-virus vaccines is that the viruses of which they are made multiply in the body in such away as to cause illness. As a result, some measles vaccines produce what seems like a mild case of measles; some polio vaccines may make the vaccinee infectious to others. Virologists have long sought a way to deliver the live (though possibly weakened) virus of a vaccine into a part of the body where it will cause neither symptoms nor infection, but will still do its job of triggering antibody formation.

Last week Government doctors announced that they had turned the trick with a coated capsule that bypasses the respiratory system and releases a dried and purified version of the live virus in the intestine, where it multiplies and starts antibody production. The virus, called adenovirus Type 4, causes a severe, grippe-like illness, and sometimes viral pneumonia, especially among raw recruits in military camps.

The capsule was perfected at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, where the researchers were themselves surprised by their success. Of 126 men who took the capsules, not one came down with "cat fever" (short for catarrhal fever), as the Navy calls the disease; of 132 who got dummy capsules, 32 became ill enough to go to the hospital, and several developed pneumonia.

Despite overoptimistic claims, the new vaccine has no immediate bearing on the common cold, which is caused by a multitude of viruses that are only distantly, if at all, related to adenovirus 4. What is hopeful, for possible vaccines against many other virus diseases, is the ingenious technique of roundabout vaccination.

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