The group B coxsackieviruses have a long and colorful history, dating to the early days of virology as we now know it. In the late 1940s, ultracentrifugation and electron microscopy were new, high-tech tools and suckling mice were suppla- ing monkeys as the virus isolation vessel of choice. Viruses were, often as not, still referred to as "filterable agents. " The rampage of paralytic poliomyelitis epid- ics in the previous 20 or so years had spurred national investment in infectious disease research, resulting in an unprecedented period of virus discovery, eclipsed only a few years later...

The group B coxsackieviruses have a long and colorful history, dating to the early days of virology as we now know it. In the late 1940s, ultracentrifugation and electron microscopy were new, high-tech tools and suckling mice were suppla- ing monkeys as the virus isolation vessel of choice. Viruses were, often as not, still referred to as "filterable agents. " The rampage of paralytic poliomyelitis epid- ics in the previous 20 or so years had spurred national investment in infectious disease research, resulting in an unprecedented period of virus discovery, eclipsed only a few years later...

S. TRACY Late in the 1940s, a virus was isolated from a young patient with a flaccid par- alysis in the sleepy Hudson River town of Coxsackie in the state of New York. Within the next few years, it was apparent that this and other similar viruses were not polioviruses but were indeed a new group of viruses, viruses that by the mid- 1950s had been found to be commonly associated with pediatric inflammatory heart disease. Two groups of coxsackieviruses (A and B) were differentiated on the basis of the type of paralysis induced in suckling mice by these viruses. Group B coxsackieviruses, because...