A Brush with EVE

When 150 virologists and public-health experts met in Philadelphia last week to swap shoptalk on the eastern equine encephalitis that flared in southern New Jersey last fall (TIME, Oct. 5), the conference chairman himself was the rarest of medical phenomena: a survivor of the deadly disease who had escaped brain damage.

Almost casually, in highly technical discussions held by the University of Pennsylvania's School of Veterinary Medicine, it was disclosed that Chairman Richard E. Shope, 58, virologist of the Rockefeller Institute, had become infected and the subject of a scientific first. Dr. Shope, working in Ocean County where encephalitis was raging, pitched energetically into the disease-detective work, collecting mosquitoes suspected of transmitting the virus. Inevitably, he was bitten. For a while he felt no ill effects. But during a mid-October train ride, Dr. Shope began to suffer chills; his muscles ached and his joints hurt. Next day he asked Dr. Delphine Clarke, a fellow worker at the institute, to draw blood for testing.

Dr. Shope's temperature shot up to 104DEG, and for a week he endured spells of alternating chills. But the agonizing doubt was continuous. For if the virus attacked the brain, he would have only a one-in-three chance of surviving, and a one-in-30 chance of escaping without paralysis and with his mind unimpaired. Dr. Clarke reported proudly but sadly that she had isolated the virus from Dr. Shope's blood. It was the first time scientists had been able to find it in the blood of a living human victim (usually they get it only after death, from brain and other nerve tissues). After ten days Dr. Shope inexplicably felt better, and has remained well.

How fortunate he was is shown by the fate of 33 New Jersey victims: 21 died, eleven had brain damage, only one recovered fully. Once infection sets in, no treatment has any effect on the progress of EEE -- or, as the experts called it more often last week, EVE, short for eastern viral encephalomyelitis. The disease is even deadlier for horses and pheasants, but can be prevented in these species by vaccination. So far, no vaccine has been approved for general use in man. Best current bet for control of EVE: identify the mosquito carriers, such as Dr. Shope was collecting, and exterminate them.

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