During a one-year survey of a children's residence housing 20 young children and employing 29 adults, a confirmed outbreak of type C influenza unassociated with other known respiratory infections was studied. Seventeen of 20 children and two of the nine employees studied developed symptoms, which were characterized primarily by fever and nasal discharge. The three children who did not contract the disease were all under three months of age. Thirteen strains of virus were recovered from throat-swab specimens: 12 from children and one from an adult. All isolates were identified serologically as type C influenza virus. Evidence of reinfection was found in a two-year-old child and two adults who developed increases in antibody titers; the virus was recovered from a throat-swab specimen from one of these adults.
Type C influenza virus has been considered an etiologic agent of mild upper respiratory illness of human beings (6,9,II,15). Sera of most healthy adults have been shown to contain hemagglutination-inhibiting (HI) antibody to the virus at a significant level (I,5,10,II,13). In contrast, the sera of children less than I year of age have not been shown to contain the antibody although antibody-positive sera increase with age among young children, aged I to 7 years (8). These facts suggest that the virus is widespread and that the majority of children are infected with the virus by the age of 7 years. However, outbreaks of type C influenza have seldom been encountered and their confirmation by either virological or serological means was made only retrospectively (5-7). This may be attributable to its poor manifestation of clinical signs and to the difficulty of isolating the virus from the patients. Epidemiological information on type C influenza has also been very limited as compared with that of types A and B influenza and no information is available about periodicity of the outbreaks, mode of transmission and maintenance of the virus in nature.To approach these problems, we attempted first to determine the age distribution of antibody to the virus in the residents of the same community in two surveys with a three-year interval. This kind of study has not been made previously in Japan and the results can be directly compared with those reported in countries outside Japan. Special efforts were also made to demonstrate maternal antibody in infants less than I year of age, because we have been puzzled by our own serological observation that children less than I year old seemed to be highly protected from the infection.A total of 186 human sera were collected from healthy residents in the age range of 0-80 years in Yamagata Prefecture, Japan, during the period of September to December 1976 and 434 sera were obtained from different individuals in the same community during the period of August to December 1979. Antibody levels were determined by measuring the hemagglutination-inhibition (HI) titer of the sera and the titers were expressed as the reciprocal of the highest serum dilution that inhibited hemagglutination. HI titration was conducted in microtiter plates, with 0.5% chicken erythrocytes and with phosphate buffered saline (PBS, 0.01 M 639
After immunizing 8-month pregnant Holstein cows with human rotavirus, Wa strain, cow colostrum containing neutralizing antibody to human rotavirus, designated as Rota colostrum, was obtained. After randomly grouping 13 infants from a single orphanage, 6 infants received 20 ml of Rota colostrum every morning and 7 control infants received 20 ml of market milk. One month later, rotavirus associated diarrhea was observed in 6 of the 7 infants given milk and 1 out of the 6 infants given Rota colostrum. Orally administered Rota colostrum significantly protected infants from diarrhea caused by rotavirus (P less than 0.05). Two out of 5 Rota colostrum recipients who were free from diarrhea showed rises in complement fixation (CF) antibody titer after the rotavirus infection epidemic. Thus, Rota colostrum prevented the outbreak of diarrhea but did not prevent immunological responses to natural rotavirus infection. In the therapeutic trial Rota colostrum had no effect on duration of diarrhea, bowel movements or virus shedding in stool. However, there were no side-effects of Rota colostrum.
An antitumour-promoting activity in two-stage carcinogenesis, is found in the methanol extract of the Carthami Flos (Carthamus tincton'us L.; Compositae), which is a traditional Chinese medicine and natural pigment of rouge additivies in certain Asian countries. From these active fractions, As-and A'-sterol fractions were separated. The separation was examined for inhibitory activity against TPA-induced inflammatory ear oedema in mice. Stigmasterol (71% in the mixture) was the most abundant of 14 sterols identified in the As-sterol fraction. Schottenol(70% in the mixture) constituted the dominant sterol of the A'-sterol fraction. Furthermore, stigmasterol markedly inhibited tumour promotion in two-stage carcinogenesis experiments.
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