An attempt to vaccinate against herpes simplex.

In 1938 Dodd, Buddingh and Johnson observed that the virus of herpes simplex could be isolated with ease from typical cases of aphthous stomatitis in infants, so providing presumptive evidence of its etiological association with the disease. In the following two years this work was extended by Burnet and Lush (1939) and Burnet and Williams (1989). They confirmed that the virus could be isolated from mouth lesions and showed that at the time of infection no herpes antibody was present in the blood but that it appeared with regularity ten to twenty days after the onset of the infection. This established the primary character of the herpetic infection in such cases. Extensive surveys of the presence of antibody in children of various ages and in adults led to the interpretation that following primary infection, usually at an age between one and three years, the virus persisted indefinitely in areas of skin contaminated at the time of the primary infection. In such persons antibody persisted through life, presumably because of the persistence of infection and its periodic activation in the form of recurrent herpes. In unpublished experiments (with formalinized virus vaccines) Nagler found that vaccination of adults subject to herpes had no infiuence on the frequency or sevei-ity of herpetic attacks. In a previous study Anderson and Hamilton have shown that herpetic stomatitis did not occur under the age of one year in children born of herpetic mothers in a Melbourne orphanage. One hypothesis in explanation of this finding was that maternal immunity persisted in the child for fourteen months on the average, although circulating herpetic antibody was demonstrable by present techniques only until the age of about seven months. This suggested the possibility of protecting children against primary herpetic infection by vaccinating them with dead herpes virus before twelve months of age. It was hoped that if sufficient immunity could be produced by this procedure to tide the children over the critical period of the second year it might be possible to prevent primary herpetie infection altogether