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Cytomegalovirus (CMV) Vaccine 1
 
Cytomegalovirus (CMV) Vaccine: What will it take?
 Roxanne Morris
College Composition II ± CM220-07naProfessor Gabriel A. Smith
 
Cytomegalovirus (CMV) Vaccine 2
 
A young girl of seventeen waits nervously in a doctor¶s office with her mother. She is pregnant. The worst of the news, however, is not that she will be a teen mom. It is that the babyshe carries will be severely disabled by a virus she has never even heard of. The doctor walks insilently with a grave look on his face. ³Young lady«,´ the doctor says. ´I don¶t know how to putthis to you gently so I will just say it. You are pregnant and the pregnancy should be terminatedimmediately.´ The young girl caught the words square on her shoulders as the color drained fromher cold face. ³Let¶s go for a walk,´ says the doctor. Room by room he parades her by manyseverely handicapped and disfigured children, some of whom were unable to even lift their ownheads. The young girl slowly began to realize why she had been referred to a high risk Ob/Gyn.³No.,´ whispered the horrified teenager as she turned to face the ominous doctor, ³I would diefor this child.´ To which the doctor replies flatly, ³Think carefully young lady. You might.´ The baby in this story is now a beautiful ten year old girl, a sister, a daughter, and her name is Amber Elizabeth.Amber was permanently disabled by a virus called Cytomegalovirus, also referred to asCMV. Amber was born full term after a very complicated pregnancy. Six months of bed rest andconstant medication did little to protect the baby from the damage being done by the congenitalCMV infection. Amber was born with hydrocephalus (also known as water on the brain) for which she required brain surgery to place a shunt just 3 days after her birth. This shunt has beeninfected and/or revised 16 times. Cerebral Palsy, brought on by the infection, prevented Amber from walking until she was almost three years old. The damage to her brain caused her  permanent hearing loss and a quite violent seizure disorder. She remained in the hospital for thefirst two years of her life and many after that. This virus may have been avoided had there been avaccine. To this day ten years later there is no effective vaccine to eradicate the ³world¶s leading
 
Cytomegalovirus (CMV) Vaccine 3
 
cause of long-term medical conditions and disabilities in children´ (Center for Disease Control,n.d.). It would be a senseless tragedy for another woman to stand before a doctor with shards of her reality crashing down at her feet. The human suffering and heartbreak this virus brings tofamilies all over America and across the world has got to cease. There needs to be a vaccine.Many experts agree that the vaccine will not likely enter the development stage without thesupport of government agencies (Arvin, Fast, Myers, Plotkin, & Rabinovich, The NationalVaccine Advisory Committee (NVAC), 2003). United States government agencies must offer  public funding support for the development of a CMV vaccine to protect the nation from a CMVepidemic.Although CMV is a quickly spreading and devastating virus, there is not much awarenessamong the American public. Cytomegalovirus is a disease that causes permanent disability in 1of 750 children born each year. The virus is spread through contact with urine, saliva, blood, andsemen. The catch is that it is most common in young children. Much like the Varicella virus(Chicken Pox), CMV is considered mostly a childhood disease. Although the virus can be spreadthrough sexual contact, the spread is most often due to contact with the urine or saliva of youngchildren. If a woman who has never been infected by the virus has a primary (first) infectionduring pregnancy, there is a 33% chance of passing the infection to the infant. Among thechildren born with a congenital CMV infection, there is a 1 in 5 chance of them developing permanent disabilities or hearing loss ( National Center for Immunization and RespiratoryDiseases, 2006). Many mothers will not learn of this virus, or how to avoid infection, until after it has permanently disabled their new born baby. According to a figure from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website, CMV has the least percentage of awarenessamong women of all the conditions that can affect children with only 22% of women having ever 
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