Does HHV-6 Kill?
Disseminated active HHV-6 infections in patients with AIDS.
"Human herpesvirus 6 (HHV-6) infected cells were detected in all lung, lymph-node, spleen, liver, and kidney tissues obtained at necropsy from an unselected series of nine patients with AIDS. This infection rate was significantly higher than that for cytomegalovirus. Lung infection with HHV-6 was extensive enough in one patient to account for fatal pneumonitis. In other tissues increased numbers of HHV-6 infected cells were related to the presence of lymphocytes infiltrates or residual lymphoid tissue, with lymphocytes being predominantly infected. Thus HHV-6 is an important pathogen in patients with AIDS."
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7906332
A fatal case of Human Herpesvirus 6 chronic myocarditis in an immunocompetent adult.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21802354
Chapter Six from: America's Biggest Cover-Up: 50 More Things Everyone Should Know About The Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Epidemic And Its Link To AIDS
It is possible, given that more than 10 different strains, or types, of HHV-6 have been identified, that different strains of the virus cause different levels of illness, ranging from almost unnoticeable (a "silent" infection) to deadly.
High levels of antibodies to HHV-6 have been found in several groups of very sick patients, including AIDS and CFS patients.
No one knows for sure what damage HHV-6 is doing in those patients. In the laboratory, however, it has been demonstrated that at least some strains of HHV-6 are very efficient killers of immune system cells -- especially T4 (or CD4) and natural killer cells, the two types of cells most affected in both CFS and AIDS.
And HHV-6 has recently been found in more than one-third of a group of Kaposi's sarcoma tumor biopsies, suggesting that it may play a role in causing this unusual cancer seen in AIDS patients.
Recently, the HHV-6 strains have been divided by researchers into two groups, or variants: Variant A, viruses which have been isolated from sick adults (those with CFS, AIDS, or cancer); and Variant B, which has been found in relatively healthy babies.
Most of the fatal HHV-6 infections identified in the medical literature, however, have occurred in very young children. Cases of fatal hepatitis, or liver disease, caused by HHV-6 in children were reported in the medical literature in 1990 and 1991. HHV-6 infection was localized, not surprisingly, primarily in the children's livers.
In summer 1992, however, a group of New York University re searchers reported a fatal, systemic -- that is, spread throughout many different organs and tissues -- HHV-6 infection in a 13-month-old girl.
The child's illness began with a fever and lack of appetite; soon, however, she began to show evidence of hemorrhaging -- uncontrolled bleeding or leaking of blood vessels -- on her face, trunk, arms, legs, and around her lips. This child also developed liver disease. She died from congestive heart failure on the fifth day after being hospitalized.
When an autopsy was performed on the child, HHV-6 infected white blood cells were found in numerous internal organs: heart, lungs, liver, spleen, thymus, kidney, and bladder, as well as in the gastrointestinal tract, salivary glands, bone marrow, lymph nodes, middle ear, peripheral nerves, and skeletal muscle.
Not too surprisingly, the physicians concluded that this disseminated, or very widespread, HHV-6 infection had killed the little girl.
If certain strains of HHV-6 are capable of causing fatal illnesses -- assuming that this is a strain-dependent phenomenon, which it may not be -- it seems that a reasonable next step in HHV-6 research would be to identify the most deadly strains
