In the late summer and fall of 1937 there occurred in St. Louis a number of cases of acute encephalitis. Virus recovered from the brains of persons dying from this disease1*2 was found to be identical with the infectious agent responsible for the epidemic of 1933.3 It has been pointed out (1) that the virus had not been isolated in the inter-epidemic period. The characteristics of the disease in 1937 were similar to those of the earlier epidemic; however, the number of cases of encephalitis among children was greater in this outbreak. The differentiation of St. Louis encephalitis from other diseases of the central nervous system during the period under consideration was complicated by a concurrent increase in the number of cases of poliomyelitis. In an attempt to establish definite diagnoses in individual cases a number of serums from children were tested for the presence of antibodies against the virus of St. Louis encephalitis.
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Smith et al. (1938) studied this question.