What Do These Findings Mean? These findings support (but do not prove) the hypothesis that influenza influences IPD incidence by enhancing the short-term risk of bacterial invasion in individuals already colonized with S. pneumoniae, possibly by increasing the permeability of the lining of the airways to bacteria. By contrast, the lack of correlation between the seasonal wave forms for the two diseases suggests that person-to-person transfer of S. pneumoniae is affected by influenza infections to a lesser extent. These findings have important implications for disease control policy. First, they suggest that the increased number of influenza infections in pandemic years may not necessarily be accompanied by a marked surge in IPD. Second, because the findings suggest that some cases of IPD may be influenza-attributable, the extension of influenza vaccination to school-age children and young adults (a group of people at particular risk of IPD who are not normally vaccinated against influenza) could reduce the incidence of IPD as well as the incidence of influenza.  Macrophage-Mediated Optic Neuritis Induced by Retrograde Axonal Transport of Spike Gene Recombinant Mouse Hepatitis Virus Following intracranial inoculation, neurovirulent mouse hepatitis virus (MHV) strains induce acute inflammation, demyelination and axonal loss in the CNS. Prior studies using recombinant MHV strains that differ only in the spike gene, which encodes a glycoprotein involved in virus-host cell attachment, demonstrated that spike mediates anterograde axonal transport of virus to the spinal cord. A demyelinating MHV strain induces optic neuritis, but whether this is due to retrograde axonal transport of viral particles to the retina, or if it is due to traumatic disruption of retinal ganglion cell axons during intracranial inoculation is not known. Using recombinant isogenic MHV strains, we examined the ability of recombinant MHV to induce optic neuritis by retrograde spread from the brain through the optic nerve into the eye following intracranial inoculation. Recombinant demyelinating MHV induced macrophage infiltration of optic nerves, demyelination and axonal loss whereas optic neuritis and axonal injury were minimal in mice infected with the non-demyelinating MHV strain that differs in the spike gene. Thus, optic neuritis was dependent on a spike glycoprotein-mediated mechanism of viral antigen transport along retinal ganglion cell axons. These data indicate that MHV spreads by retrograde axonal transport to the eye and that targeting spike protein interactions with axonal transport machinery is a potential therapeutic strategy for CNS viral infections and associated diseases. Neurotropic mouse hepatitis virus (MHV) infection in mice causes meningoencephalitis, myelitis, and demyelination, with relative axonal preservation. Recent studies have additionally demonstrated that neurotropic MHV strains can also induce axonal loss (1, 2) ; direct virus-mediated axonal damage can occur concurrently with and independently of demyelination (2) . Thus, neurovirulent MHV strains provide useful tools for studying the neuroinflammation, demyelination, and axonal loss and as a virus-induced model of multiple sclerosis.