Possible virus aetiology of non-specific urethritis.

The simplest classification of cases of urethritis is a broad division into the gonococcal and nongonococcal varieties. The non-gonococcal group includes a number of conditions in which a cause is identifiable, such as Trichomonas vaginalis, chemical irritants, and strictures or diseases of the upper renal tract, but these and other cases form only a small proportion of the group, and the cause of the commonest variety, usually termed non-specific urethritis, remains undiscovered. On epidemiological grounds, non-specific urethritis is usually considered to be due to an infection. In recent years much attention has been given to the role played by pleuro-pneumonialike organisms. but there is as yet no proof of their pathogenicity in the human urogenital tract in a majority of cases. It has frequently been suggested that the disease is caused by a virus, the presumptive evidence of such a cause being the discovery of inclusion bodies in the urethral cells of men with urethritis (Lindner, 1910; Thygeson and Mengert, 1936; Thygeson and Stone, 1942; Siboulet, 1955). These bodies resemble the intracellular inclusions produced by the larger "viruses" of the trachomalymphogranulomavenereum group, and appear to be morphologically very similar to those found in the conjunctival epithelial cells of babies with inclusion blennorrhoea and in the cervical epithelium ofwomen. The production of inclusion conjunctivitis in baboons inoculated with secretions (in which inclusions had been demonstrated) from men with urethritis, women with cervicitis, and babies with conjunctivitis (Fritsch, Hofstatter, and Lindner, 1910) suggests a relationship between these three conditions. Although the virus of inclusion conjunctivitis has been isolated from the cervices of women (Jones, Collier, and Smith, 1959) and from the eye of a baby (Reed, 1961,