STEALTH VIRUS EPIDEMIC IN THE MOHAVE VALLEY .1. INITIAL REPORT OF VIRUS ISOLATION

Increasing numbers of patients within the Mohave Valley region of the United States are reporting symptoms attributable to atypical neurolog ical illness. Many of these patients have experienced an acute-onset g astrointestinal illness during the spring and summer of 1996. Stealth viral cultures performed on the blood of 40 of these patients have bee n uniformly positive, yielding unequivocal transmissible cytopathic ef fect (CPE) in both human- and monkey-derived cell lines. One patient h as died from a stealth-CPE-positive glioblastoma, while another patien t has developed a pleomorphic adenoma of the parotid. Viral cultures a nd epidemiological data support human-to-human, and probable human-to- dog, transmission of the Mohave stealth virus infection.