A review of feline infectious peritonitis virus infection: 1963-2008

This comprehensive review synthesized four and a half decades of research on feline infectious peritonitis, covering the biology of feline coronavirus, the internal-mutation hypothesis by which a benign enteric virus transforms into the lethal FIP biotype, immunopathogenesis, clinical forms, and the longstanding difficulty of diagnosis and treatment. Written before effective antivirals existed, it captured the state of a disease then regarded as essentially incurable and framed the questions that later antiviral breakthroughs would answer. It matters as an authoritative consolidation of FIP knowledge that shaped a generation of clinicians and researchers, articulating the pathogenesis model and diagnostic challenges that motivated the eventual development of curative nucleoside-analog and protease-inhibitor therapies.