• Embed Doc
  • Copy Link
  • Readcast
  • Collections
  • CommentGo Back
Download
 
Pathogens & People: Tumors and viruses: What's the connection?By EDWARD McSWEEGAN, For The CapitalPublished 03/01/09
Whatever your political persuasion, I think you would have to agree that Sen. Ted Kennedy is alucky man. He has survived decades of ruthless national politics, endless family tragedies, personal legal problems, and, most recently, a deadly form of brain cancer. He's a survivor inevery senseWhat he survived last year was an aggressive brain tumor called glioblastoma multiforme. Eachyear, 10,000 Americans are diagnosed with it, and it is usually fatal. The ultimate consequencesof this brain cancer are no mystery, but the ultimate cause of this deadly illness still is. Someresearchers think the cause of Kennedy's type of brain cancer is a virus that is present in 80 percent of the U.S. population.That virus is called Cytomegalovirus. It is a herpes virus in the same family as chickenpox,genital herpes and mononucleosis viruses. CMV is spread by close person-to-person contact, blood transfusions and pregnancy. Studies suggest that between 3 and 11 percent of healthyadults and 50 percent of children shed the virus in urine or saliva.Usually CMV produces a "silent" or symptom-free infection. Yet the virus will persist forever inthe host as a "latent" or dormant infection.Does CMV really cause cancers? If CMV permanently infects 80 percent of the U.S. population,why don't most of us have brain tumors? If CMV is contagious, are some brain cancers alsocontagious? Good questions, but of course, there are no good answers yet.In 2002, a group of scientists found active CMV in the brain tumor tissue of two dozen patientssuffering from glioblastoma multiforme. More recently, CMV was found to be active in about 90 percent of such brain tumors. But it's a chicken or egg situation: which came first, the virus tostart the tumor or the tumor to awaken the dormant virus? Then there are the statistics. MostAmericans have CMV, yet only one in 30,000 gets a glioblastoma. Last summer, DukeUniversity neurologist Duane Mitchell told
Scientific American
, "Most evidence to date does notsupport CMV being a cancer-causing virus."The hunt for such viruses began 100 years ago when a Long Island farmer brought a tumor-riddled chicken to the Rockefeller Institute in New York City. A curious researcher named PeytonRous extracted some cancer cells from the bird, ground them up, filtered the resulting solution
of 00

Leave a Comment

You must be to leave a comment.
Submit
Characters: ...
You must be to leave a comment.
Submit
Characters: ...