MURINE AIDS - A MODEL FOR THE HUMAN-DISEASE OR A DISTINCT ENTITY

The LP-BM5 mixture of murine retroviruses elicits a disease in mice re ferred to as murine immunodeficiency syndrome (MAIDS) that is consider ed by some to be an animal homologue of human AIDS. In this article, w e present and discuss some recent findings on the pathogenesis of the murine disease and their implications for the proposed homology betwee n murine and human syndromes. The murine disease seems to display as m any similarities to as it does differences from human AIDS. Among the latter are: definitive and exclusive viral etiology, a strong genetic effect on susceptibility to infection, expansion of the CD4+ cell popu lation in spleen and peripheral blood, consistent transmissibility by a single transfusion of the minute amounts of blood or plasma from inf ected donors, and striking similarity between virus-induced alteration of the in vitro spleen cell proliferation and those caused by treatme nt with a protein kinase inhibitor K252a. With this in mind, the use o f the noncommittal term retrovirus-induced murine lymphoproliferative disease instead of MAIDS appears to be more appropriate at this time.