FIG. 2.

Protection against eye disease. Rabbits were vaccinated three times either systemically or periocularly, and ocularly challenged, and eye disease was monitored on days 3, 5, 7, 10, and 14 as described in Materials and Methods. Each time point represents the average readings of both eyes from 11 to 16 rabbits from vaccinated or mock-vaccinated rabbits (ocular KOS vaccine, 11 rabbits; systemic KOS vaccine, 15 rabbits; ocular gB2/gD2 vaccine, 15 rabbits; systemic gB2/gD2 vaccine, 15 rabbits; adjuvant control, 16 rabbits). Single asterisks indicate points that are significantly less than for the mock-vaccinated control group at the 95% level, using the Student t test; double asterisks indicate values for the periocular vaccine group that are significantly less than values for the corresponding systemic vaccine group. Statistical analyses were done on a per-rabbit basis. Thus, the readings from both eyes were averaged for each rabbit, and the resulting value for each rabbit was used for the analyses (i.e., n for each group was the number of rabbits, not the number of eyes, in the group). The same groups showed statistical significance when analyses were done on a per-eye basis (not shown).