Three-week-old female CD-1 mice were purchased from Charles River Laboratories (Wilmington, MA). The mice were inoculated either intramuscularly (50 µl total volume) or intracerebrally (20 µl total volume) with 10-fold serial dilutions of rSA14-14-2 or one of its derivatives in α-MEM. As a control, mice were mock-inoculated with the same total volume of the culture supernatant of BHK-21 cells, either intramuscularly or intracerebrally. Following infection, the mice were monitored for clinical signs or death daily over 22 days. Dose-response survival curves for each virus were generated using the Kaplan-Meier method.