Medicine: Polio's Little Brother

As a disease detective in New York's Westchester County, Dr. Gilbert Dalldorf was called in on many a late-summer and early-fall epidemic of what seemed to be mild polio. Few victims suffered paralysis, and all recovered, often with startling rapidity. In a 1942 outbreak in White Plains, Dr. Dalldorf saw what he calls "the footprints of other viruses," but it took him five years to track down the particles. From patients with similar illnesses in the Hudson River town of Coxsackie (pop. 2,800), Dr. Dalldorf isolated a hitherto unknown virus. The Coxsackie virus...