Isolation of Coxsackie Virus From Patients With Epidemic Pleurodynia

Epidemic myalgia, or pleurodynia, was probably first observed as a clinical entity by the Icelandic physician Jon Finsen.1In 1874 he described two epidemics of the disease, one of them occurring in 1856 and the other in 1866. Finsen called the disease pleurodynia. Since 1928 the disease has annually figured in the Icelandic health reports. Several authors have recently reported the successful isolation of strains of the so-called Coxsackie viruses in cases of epidemic pleurodynia.2These observations stimulated us to search for this type of virus in an epidemic that occurred in Reykjavik, in 1951. In the period from April to August, 1951, 225 cases of epidemic pleurodynia were registered in Reykjavik, a town of 57,500 inhabitants. The morbidity thus amounted to about 0.5%. In this period no cases of anterior acute poliomyelitis or aseptic meningitis were reported. The main symptoms and signs in these patients were as