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Article: A versatile virus: Epstein-Barr virus displays a few new malignant tricks. (links to smooth muscle and breast cancer)
- Article from:
- Science News
- Article date:
- February 18, 1995
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1995 Science Service, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Sharon B. Murphy recalls treating a 4-year-old boy whose immune system had been damaged by AIDS. The youngster also suffered from a rare cancer of the smooth muscle cells.
"To have two rare conditions coinciding in a single patient set off an alarm bell," says Murphy, a pediatric oncologist at Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago. After noticing several similar cases, Murphy and some colleagues did a little medical sleuthing.
They knew about an unpublished report linking the Epstein-Barr virus to this same cancer, so they decided to look for the virus in tissue samples collected from their young patients. "And there it was, son of a gun," Murphy ...