The latest virus doing the rounds is Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV), which is usually mild for health adults, but could be dangerous for young children and the elderly. So where did this virus come from? The official account is that it came from Africa in 1956. However, there vis an alternative case, documented below, that, “[t]his was a time when research was being undertaken into the mass production of the polio viral vaccine. In order to conduct the research, viruses were grown in monkey kidney cells. As a result hundreds of thousands of monkeys were shipped to the US.
In late 1955 a troop of chimpanzees at the Walter Reed Army Institute began coughing and sneezing. Morris et al isolated the agent that caused the respiratory illness in one of the chimps and called it Chimpanzee Coryza Agent Virus (CCA). The remaining 13 chimps all developed antibodies to this newly isolated virus.
