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Article: Adventitious viruses and smallpox vaccine.(LETTERS)(Letter to the Editor)
- Article from:
- Emerging Infectious Diseases
- Article date:
- November 1, 2005
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2005 U.S. National Center for Infectious Diseases. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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To the Editor: Recently, Murphy and Osburn (1) strongly argued for testing old smallpox vaccine stocks made in animal skin for adventitious infectious agents such as viruses, mycoplasmas, and eventually, prions. Their argument appears clearly justified after unexpected cases of myopericarditis occurred during recent campaigns of smallpox vaccinations in the United States (2).
To the long list of bovine viruses cited in this paper, it seems necessary to add another, the pseudocowpox virus, a widespread parapoxvirus that may infect humans. During the 1960s, this virus was identified in vaccine lymph from a heifer at the Institut Pasteur, Paris (3).
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