Coronavirus infection in acute lower respiratory tract disease of infants.

The 1974 article by my colleagues and me describing studies of coronavirus infection in hospitalized infants with acute lower respiratory–tract disease (LRTD) [1] takes on a particular interest in light of the 2002–2003 epidemic of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) coronavirus infections, with the wider perspective provided by that event on emerging epidemics, acute respiratory infections in general, human coronaviruses, and viruses that appear to have jumped barriers between species. The study published in The Journal of Infectious Diseases described a collaboration between our group in Denver (pediatric virologists familiar with the diagnosis and study of coronaviruses) and Maurice Mufson and his colleagues who, at the time, were working in the pediatric wards of Cook County Hospital in Chicago. The objective of the study was to investigate the role that coronaviruses might play in LRTDs in hospitalized infants in an urban environment. The serosurvey we conducted was a supplement to a previous, more-extensive study at Cook County Hospital of traditional respiratory viruses and Mycoplasma pneumoniae conducted by Dr. Mufson and his colleagues [2]. Both studies used serum and respiratory samples obtained from infants !18 months of age hospitalized from 1967 to 1970. At that time, the known human coronaviruses comprised several viruses recovered from the respiratory tracts of patients with colds. The first human corona-