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A 14-month-old heifer with a 17-day history of unresponsive bloody diarrhea was necropsied. There were focal, pink-red erosions of the nares and hard palate; ulcers and fissures of the tongue; and multiple ulcerative lesions of the alimentary canal. Interdigital skin of both rear limbs was ulcerated and bleeding; and the margins of the vulva contained punctiform red ulcers. The gross lesions were consistent with mucosal disease. Histopathology and laboratory testing ruled out rinderpest, foot-and-mouth disease, and vesicular stomatitis, and identified bovine virus diarrhea virus to be the cause of this disease. Lesions of the vulva similar to those seen in some stages of infectious pustular vulvovaginitis were negative for bovine herpesvirus-1 and tested positive for bovine viral diarrhea virus antigen by immunohistochemistry.

The principal reason that militates against acceptance of the one positive hypothesis of etiology in epidemic encephalitis, namely that it may be due to a neurotropic strain of Herpes virus, is the fact that this easily identifiable virus has been isolated in less than a dozen cases of the disease. The only positive isolations in this country are, so far as we know, those briefly referred to in connection with other work.1 These first American isolations occurred in 3 successive cases of encephalitis after measles in children. The peculiar conditions explain, we believe, 2 of the reasons why more frequent success has not been obtained by others. In each instance the encephalitis occurred immediately after the exanthem, was clinically characteristic, and was histologically consistent with a diagnosis of epidemic encephalitis, but suspensions of these human brains failed to kill rabbits on intracerebral injection. Two of these 3 brains did, however, produce an herpetiform skin eruption in rabbits, proved to...