Royal Free Disease after 65 years: What was it and what has become of it?, Mortimer, 2020

Reviews in Medical Virology

Royal Free Disease after 65 years: What was it and what has become of it?
Philip P. Mortimer
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/rmv.2096

Editorial (no abstract) Sci Hub link https://sci-hub.ru/10.1002/rmv.2096

Extract:

"From early July to mid-October 1955, the Royal Free Hospital Group (RFHG), in origin London's teaching hospital for women, experienced an outbreak of an illness characterised by mild fever and features of myoneurasthenia.1

About 300 cases were diagnosed within the group, including many nurses and some medical staff, medical students and in-patients. Though the RFHG then had its main site in central London on The Grays Inn Road, there were four associated hospitals in North West London, one a fever hospital; and in the spring of 1955, a similar illness had been seen in patients in the area. Cases continued to arise in that community during 1955.

Most of the cases in the hospital staff of so-called Royal Free Disease (RFD) lasted 1 to 2 weeks, but some went on for several weeks and outliers lasted for a year or more. The number of staff needing hospital care was so great that the hospital group had otherwise to close its beds from July to October 1955. Though RFD was apparently transmissible, no causative agent was ever found in spite of extensive investigations. These included virus cultures in the several cell lines available in the 1950s."