Cytomegalovirus Infection(Recent Progress in Medical Virology of Five Etiologies)

A rural area (Suibara County) of Niigata Prefecture was investigated for the prevalence of cytomegalovirus (CMV) infection among the residents, particularly among the pregnant women and newborn infants, using serological and virological methods. Complement-fixation test revealed the incidence of CMV antibody in 93.9% of the cord-blood specimens. By employing a human diploid cell line, CMV could be isolated from urines of infants, covering the age groups of below 2-month-old to 14-year-old with a highest isolation rate of 63.3% at 9-to 11-month-old, indicating the occurrence of perinatal infection in the same rate at least. These findings in the perinatal conditions also anticipated an ubiquitous prevalence of CMV infection among the other age groups of residents and alarmed a signal for the risk of clinical hazards due to reactivation of the latent virus, provided that the individuals were subjected to a compromised state of immunity, receiving organ-transplantation for example. For the reactivation mechanisms of the latent virus in pregnancy, impairment of cellular immunity has been raised as a possibility. Pregnant women were compared with nonpregnant women for the efficiency of the peripheral lymphocytes in the blast-transformation, where the specimens of the former group gave a significatly (p