Lymphocytic Choriomeningitis Virus Applied to Skin

The virus of lymphocytic choriomeningitis has been found capable of producing infection in certain laboratory animals when inoculated by a variety of routes. These include the common methods of inoculation, such as the intracerebral (1), subcutaneous (2), intraperitoneal (3), intravenous (3), and intralingual (5). Infection is produced also when virus is applied to the mucous membranes of the nose (3), vagina (4), urethra (4), and rectum (5). Furthermore, it has been shown by Findlay and Stern (6) that, when this virus was rubbed on the lightly scarified skins of mice they did not exhibit apparent infection but the virus could be recovered from their spleens and kidneys. These investigators also showed that, when the virus was rubbed (6) on the lightly scarified skins of two rhesus monkeys, one showed a slight febrile reaction. Shaughnessy and Milzer (7) demonstrated that guinea pigs exhibited the typical picture of the disease when the virus was placed on skin so lightly scarified that blood was not drawn. In the experiments presented here, a preliminary report of which has been published (8), we wish to present more detailed evidence that the virus may penetrate the normal, unscarified skin of guinea pigs. The possibility that passage of some viruses through normal skin may occur has been tacitly considered by some observers. Thus, it is common practice to administer antirabic vaccine to persons whose hands have been licked or otherwise contaminated with the saliva of rabid dogs. However, we were not aware of any experiments bearing on this question until after our preliminary report had been published. We then learned of the experiments of Bauer and Hudson (9) on the passage of yellow fever virus through the skin. Their methods differed from ours in several important respects. Bauer and Hudson rubbed their virus preparations on the skin while ours were merely deposited on the skin. Furthermore, they made no attempts to exclude the possibility of the monkeys scratching the virus into the skin, or transferring it to mucous membranes. In our experiments the virus was