Chronic Neurological Diseases

Abstract

Most subacute and chronic progressive degenerative diseases of the central nervous system of man have been classified as disorders of unknown etiology. Few if any are curable, and although some are genetically determined, most are sporadic in occurrence, and there appears not to be a history of the disease in close relatives. That any one or more of these chronic idiopathic disorders might have infection as their etiology was not recognized until the subacute progressive degenerative heredofamilial disease kuru was transmitted to chimpanzees and was subsequently shown to be serially transmissible in experimental animals inoculated with bacteria- free filtrates of brain tissues from animals dying with the disease. Kuru thus became the first subacute fatal central nervous system disease of man to have a virus-induced “slow infection” established as its etiology.