Experimental trachoma produced by a West Australian virus.

RECENT ophthalmic surveys in Western Australia by Mann (1954a, 1954b, 1956), with the support of the Public Health Department and the Royal Flying Doctor Service, have shown that trachoma is the greatest single cause of ocular morbidity and blindness over large areas of rural Australia. The first successful culture in Australia of the causative agent was accomplished in Perth by Perret and Mann (1960). The virus was obtained by scraping the conjunctiva of a 3-year-old half-caste boy in Moora, a small town about 100 miles north of Perth. This child showed typical necrotic follicles in the upper tarsal conjunctiva but had no discharge and was quite asymptomatic. The virus was passaged through eggs according to the method of T'ang, Chang, Huang, and Wang (1957). This Australian virus behaved culturally in a similar way to the virus isolated from Gambian trachoma by Collier and Sowa (1958). The present communication deals with the further investigation of this same strain of Australian trachoma virus and the production by it of clinical trachoma in a human volunteer.