In Texas, particles resembling murine leukemia virus have been seen in both leukemic children and their family dogs.
And in California, the largest animal tumor registry in the US has begun its third year of plotting the natural incidence of malignancy among household pets.
These are two of the more recent developments in the effort to prove or disprove a relationship between malignancy in man and animal via viral or other pathways.
Although bits of evidence continue to accumulate, no investigator is ready to affirm that such a pathway does exist.
A cluster of three leukemia cases in the same neighborhood was investigated by a team at Baylor Medical College and M. D. Anderson Hospital.
Two of the Texas children had "a suspicious association with prior dog contact," G. L. Van Hoosier, Jr., DVM, told the Southwestern Conference on Diseases in Nature Transmissible to Man.
Acute lymphatic leukemia was diagnosed