ABSTRACT
The discovery of an autonomous human parvovirus which causes systemic disease with blood-borne spread was pure serendipity. Certainly the discovery of human adeno-associated viruses was a chance finding arising from the examination of adenovirus stocks by electron microscopy. With the human serum parvovirus, the more usual pattern of the incidental finding of a virus apparently not associated with specific disease was preserved. The reactivity of the sera in electrophoresis tests for hepatitis B surface antigen (HBsAg) was due simply to the fact that these tests used human sera, some of which contained antibody to the newly discovered virus. It was that a new human parvovirus was discovered, an apparently common infection in the population not at first associated with any specific clinical illness. Observation of the tradition of naming new autonomous parvoviruses would lead to the designation "human parvovirus".
