Friday, November 28, 2008

Even Cowdry himself wasn't so sure of the significance of the Cowdry B inclusion

Here's a follow-up on my recent post on the presence of Cowdry B inclusions in poliomyelitis. Thanks to Dr. Doug Shevlin, who encouraged me to go back to the original paper by EV Cowdry to find out exactly what Cowdry meant when he described type B inclusions as being characteristic of polio. Here's a quotation from his original 1934 paper on the topic of viral inclusions: "[W]ith these type B inclusions the existence of a virus should not be taken for granted. They may be simply the expression of nuclear modifications occuring not only in some virus diseases but also in many condidtions for which viruses are probably not responsible." There you have it, even O'l Cowdry wasn't so sure about the correlation of these inclusions to polio. Perhaps it's finally time to eliminate from textbooks the "fact" that Cowdry B inclusions occur in polio. (With this additional information, I now feel comfortable increasing my reward to anyone who can email me a photomicrograph of a polio-associated Cowdry B inclusion from $10 up to $12. Good luck -- you'll need it!)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Did J. Clay Goodman send you his picture?

Brian E. Moore, MD, MEd said...

Of course not. No such picture exists in this universe!

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