Miami Herald - Friday, November 8, 1985
Steve Sternberg, Herald Medical Writer

The virus, which remains unidentified, resembles but is not the same as HTLV-1, a virus that causes human leukemia, one of the researchers said Thursday.

"We have found this in between 50 percent and 60 percent of the cases we have looked at in Sweden and Key West," said Dr. Elaine Defreitas, of the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia. "I am not saying this is the cause of MS. We are not even saying this is implicated."

Genetic material from the new virus was found in T-cells, a type of white blood cell, taken from the spinal fluid of multiple sclerosis patients. The fluid is produced in the brain and bathes the brain and spinal cord.

Multiple sclerosis is a poorly understood disease that typically attacks slightly more women than men between the ages of 20 and 40. It is a disease in which the body's blood-borne immune system goes awry and sends destructive blood cells to attack myelin, a coating that insulates the nerves.

When the myelin is worn away, nerve impulses short-circuit and the brain no longer commands the muscles.

That immune system is directed by T-cells, the white blood cells in which the new virus was found.

Genetic material from the virus was found in 36 percent of patients tested by researchers at the University of Miami, the Wistar Institute, The National Cancer Institute and the University of Lund, in Sweden.

Defreitas said researchers found higher levels of antibodies produced by the body to destroy the virus in from 50 to 60 percent of multiple sclerosis patients than in normal people and people with other brain disorders.

She declined to reveal details of the research until it is published next week in the British journal Nature.

Blood and spinal fluid from Key West's unprecedented subtropical epidemic of multiple sclerosis provided an important source of information for researchers, said Dr. William A. Sheremata, of the University of Miami and a member of the research team.

At least 29 cases of the disease have been identified in Key West, giving the island a multiple sclerosis rate of 100 per 100,000 people, among the highest in the world.

Sheremata said the spinal fluid was drawn from about 10 patients and blood from about 30 multiple sclerosis patients in Key West during clinics last summer.

"I think it is an exciting first step, but it would not be correct to say that the MS virus has been identified," he said. "It may or may not be. . . . A lot more work has to be done."

Joan Higgs, a Key West MS victim and nursing administrator at Florida Keys Memorial Hospital, said: "I can't separate my medical reaction from my personal reaction. What it does is bring to my mind questions."

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