Factors Influencing Coxsackie Infection

~;There has been much documentation of differences in severity of disease, alteration of the disease pattern, development of overt or latent infection, and duration of the carrier state in animals of various ages. However, few attempts have been made to compare pathogenesis of disease at periods of susceptibility and refractoriness in order to gain insight into fundamental mechanisms involved. I t is often assumed that increased resistance developing with maturation is related to inability of the virus to multiply at the site of inoculation, or failure in dissemination caused by regional barriers so that the virus does not reach areas favorable for multiplication or ones in which damage may be lethal. This concept has been based largely upon the extensive and detailed investigations of vesicular stomatitis and equine encephalomyelitis infections by Sabin and Olitsky (2-4) who found that with maturation barriers to CNS invasion appeared at the peritoneum, the myoneural junction, the retina, and the anterior rhinencephalon. Coxsackie virus infection in mice is a host-virus system in which there are striking changes in resistance from marked susceptibility to relative refractoriness within a