The virus of poliomyelitis, because of its specificity, has been a relatively difficult organism with which to work in a laboratory. Immunological studies, based upon experimentally produced disease in animals, have resulted in such a mass of difficultly interpreted evidence that one is forced to return to a restudy of the disease as it occurs in man.Susceptibility as Indicated by Virgin Soil Outbreaks and Case Fatality Rates. Virgin soil outbreaks of any highly communicable disease give a picture of autarceologic susceptibility not obscured by previously established immunity. For instance, when measles invaded the Faroe Islands, after being absent for 65 years, everyone under the age of 65 developed the disease (1).With our ability to recover the virus of poliomyelitis from the stools of cases, contacts, and others, we have demonstrated in poliomyelitis what Wickman and Caverly hypothesized on the basis of epidemiologic reasoning, the phenomenon of widespread infection without disease.
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