Emergence of Epidemic O'nyong-nyong Fever in Southwestern Uganda, After an Absence of 35 Years

In their excellent article, Molecular Approaches to the Identification of Unculturable Infectious Agents, Gao and Moore (1) point out that molecular approaches should be unleashed on diseases such as sarcoidosis, Kawasaki disease, and type I diabetes mellitus, which are thought but not proven to be infectious.The authors, however, are overlooking the more common and most likely infectious disease of unknown etiology today-prostatitis.According to the pathologist McNeal, the prostate gland is the most commonly diseased internal organ of the human body (2).Prostatitis is the most common prostate disease, resulting in more physician visits than either benign prostatic hyperplasia or prostate cancer, according to the National Institutes of Health (3).Despite its frequency, prostatitis as a disease and as a histologic lesion is understudied (4).By the Meares and Stamey culture localization procedure, in which the first voided urine, a midstream urine, the expressed prostatic secretions, and a final voided urine are compared, more than 90% of cases in patients with chronic pelvic symptoms are labeled as "nonbacterial" prostatitis or prostatodynia, both of which are thought to be incurable diseases (5).The University of Washington has documented white blood cell counts as high as 38,000 per mm 3 , in "nonbacterial" prostatitis patients (6).According to urologist Thomas Stamey, up to 50% of all men experience symptoms of prostatitis during