This Article  • Full text  • PDF  • Correction  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Citing articles on Web of Science (16)  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in JAMA  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

Brian Vastag

JAMA. 2002;288:1337-1338.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

Washington—It was a dirty job and nobody had to do it. But an international team of scientists did it anyway, testing dozens of sewage samples for simian virus 40 (SV40), which in the 1950s and 1960s contaminated millions of doses of polio vaccine. The unsavory task yielded compelling evidence of person-to-person transmission of SV40, evidence that complicates the contentious search for links between the monkey virus and human cancers.

During the past decade, an increasingly acrimonious debate over the issue has split researchers. One camp, mainly pathologists, reports finding the virus in human brain, bone, and lung tumors. The other, mainly epidemiologists, counters that cancer trends discount any link.

Colored transmission electron micrograph of polyoma viruses, simian viruses (SV40) that are a type of papovavirus. Under laboratory conditions, they can cause the development of tumors in mice. (Photo credit: CDC / Photo Researchers, Inc.)

The sewage . . . [Full Text of this Article]

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?