PEDIATRICS Vol. 81 No. 4 April 1988, pp. 599
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Lack of Evidence of Retroviral Involvement in Kawasaki Disease

TAKASHI OKAMOTO 1, HIROYO KUWABARA 1, KUNITADA SHIMOTOHNO 1, TAKASHI SUGIMURA 1, YOSHIO YANASE 2, and TOMISAKU KAWASAKI 2

1 Division of Virology, National Cancer Center Research Institute, Chuo-ku, Tokyo 104, Japan
2 Department of Pediatrics, Japan Red Cross Medical Center, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo 150, Japan

To the Editor.—

Microbes have long been suspected to be a causative agent of Kawasaki disease since the original report by Kawasaki.1 Yanagawa et al2 described an epidemic wave of Kawasaki disease spread from central Japan to the entire nation in 6 months. This strongly suggests that an infectious agent might be involved. Furthermore, recent studies by Shulman and Rowley3 and Burnes et al4 have independently demonstrated retrovirus-specific reverse transcriptase activities in the culture supernatants of peripheral mononuclear cells from US patients with Kawasaki disease.