American, British, and French teams pressing the search for the virus and the vector that are "almost certainly" the cause and the source of the malignant lymphoma that affects children in central Africa, according to Denis Burkitt, MD, of Kampala, Uganda.
Burkitt told the American College of Surgeons at San Francisco last month that virologists from the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Research Institute in New York City, the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, the Imperial Cancer Research Fund of Great Britain, and Paris' Pasteur Institute are working in central Africa in an attempt to obtain the first direct evidence of a virus-causing cancer in humans.
The theory suggesting an insect-borne viral etiology for the tumor stems from the restricted distribution of the malignancy. It does not occur above an altitude of 5,000 feet, nor is it found in regions in which the temperature drops below 60 F. The appearance of a