Background of the development of a live varicella vaccine, including studies on the attenuation of measles and polioviruses, and transformation experiments of cultured hamster and human cells with conditional lethal mutants of adenovirus and herpes simplex virus were described. Varicella-zoster virus (Oka strain) was passaged in guinea pig cells, and the resulting virus (vaccine virus) was found to have a higher affinity to guinea pig cells. It was recently proved that variations of base sequence occurred exclusively in gene 62 (immediate-early gene) in comparison of vaccine Oka virus and parent Oka virus. This variation is presumed to have occurred during passage in guinea pig cells. Live varicella vaccine (Oka strain) has increasingly been used throughout the world. It was also found in a preliminary study that giving the vaccine to the elderly enhanced humoral and cell-mediated immunity, leading to a prevention of post herpetic neuralgia. A large field trial is now going on in the United States to immunize the elderly for the purpose of prevention of herpes zoster, particularly post herpetic neuralgia.

Worldwide attention has been given to scrapie, because bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) could be experimentally transmitted to sheep. This ovine form of BSE was clinically identical to scrapie. In Japanese scrapie cases, a majority of the diseased sheep were from Suffolk, while 8 cases were from Corriedale. It is very likely that sheep-to-sheep transmission of scrapie has taken place in Obihiro, Hokkaido. Normal prion protein may play a role in the morphoregulatory signaling pathway, which orchestrates the specificity of a particular cellular response. Over-expression of normal prion protein in mice cause neurodegenerative disorders. Recently, Prnd was identified downstream of the mouse prion protein gene (Prnp), and encodes 179 amino acids and a prion protein (PrP)-like protein designated doppel (Dpl). Dpl was upregulated in the central nervous system of two PrP-deficient lines of mice, as well as in prionless cell lines. Dpl caused neurodegeneration similar to that caused by PrP. Linked expression of Prnp and Prnd may cause several neurodegenerative disorders.

Sulfated colominic acid exhibited suppressive effects on SA11 (simian rotavirus)- and MO (human rotavirus)-infections, but not on Wa (human rotavirus)-, Sabin 1 (poliovirus 1)-, and Nancy (coxsackie B3 virus)-­ infections, in vitro. The infection of SA11 was found to be inhibited by mixed treatment and early posttreatment with sulfated colominic acid, but not by pretreatment, by plaque assay and multiple growth assay. The results were confirmed by the infectivity titer, RNA polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis, and electron microscopic analysis. The mechanism of the suppressive effect was suggested to be adsorption inhibition at an early stage of the infection.

The viral load of different hepatitis C virus (HCV) subtypes, including the globally distributed HCV-1b and the unique Indonesian subtype HCV-1c, was analyzed using serum samples obtained from Indonesian blood donors and patients with chronic liver disease. The mean viral load of HCV-1c was comparable with that of HCV-1b, suggesting that HCV-1c is as pathogenic as HCV-1b. On the other hand, the mean viral load of HCV-2a was lower than that of HCV-1b or HCV-1c, with this result being consistent with previous observations. Interestingly, some HCV-2a strains were associated with a high viral load that was almost equivalent to that of HCV-1b and HCV-1c. This result implies the possibility that there exists a minor fraction of HCV-2a strains that cause higher levels of viremia compared with the majority of ordinary HCV-2a strains.

We established a multiplex polymerase chain reaction (PCR) method for simultaneous detection of hepatitis B, C, and G viral genomes. The levels of concordance with the data obtained by conventional single PCR method were 100% for single infection, 98 to 100% for double infections, and 92% for triple infections. This method is not only suited to rapid, large-scale epidemiological screening and clinical diagnosis of those virus infections occurring alone or in combination, but is also time- and cost-effective.