Daily Almanac for
Oct 14, 2008
Search White Pages
Info search tips
Bio search tips

Encyclopedia

Epstein-Barr virus

Epstein-Barr virus (EBV), herpesvirus that is the major cause of infectious mononucleosis and is associated with a number of cancers, particularly lymphomas in immunosuppressed persons, including persons with AIDS. Epstein-Barr is a ubiquitous virus, so common that it has been difficult to determine whether it is the cause of certain diseases or whether it is simply there as an artifact. In Third World nations, most children are infected with EBV; in most industrialized nations, about 50% of the people are infected. Research has found that all of the lymphomas associated with AIDS and most lymphomas in other immunocompromised persons are connected with latent EBV infection. EBV has been found in biopsy tissue of patients with Hodgkin's disease, breast cancer, and some smooth muscle tumors. EBV also was formerly suspected as the cause of chronic fatigue syndrome (originally named chronic EBV syndrome).

The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2007, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.

    • Cite
    • Print
    • Bookmark

More on Epstein-Barr virus from Infoplease:

See more Encyclopedia articles on: Pathology


Warning: DOMDocument::loadXML(): Input is not proper UTF-8, indicate encoding ! Bytes: 0xD6 0x7A 0x79 0x61 in Entity, line: 1 in /site/html/include/elibrary_search_box.php on line 284
Premium Partner Content
HighBeam Research
Documents Images and Maps Reference
(from Newspapers, Magazines, Journals, Newswires, Transcripts and Books)

Research our extensive archive of more than 28 million documents from 2,600 sources.

Additional search results provided by HighBeam Research, LLC. © Copyright 2005. All rights reserved.