Hepatitis E

In the mid-1990s, a group of scientists in the Laboratory of Infectious Diseases at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) discovered a vaccine for hepatitis E virus. But the story does not end with their discovery. Nor did it begin when the same group, led by Robert Purcell, M.D., first began working on hepatitis E—a disease responsible for numerous epidemics in Central and Southeast Asia, North and West Africa, and in Mexico.
The story really began more than half a century ago—in one of the worst outbreaks of waterborne hepatitis, which struck New Delhi, India, in the winter of 1955–1956.