Human cardioviruses, meningitis, and sudden infant death syndrome in children

Abstract

Cardioviruses cause myocarditis and encephalomyelitis in rodents; human cardioviruses have not been ascribed to any disease. We screened 6,854 cerebrospinal fluid and 10 myocardium specimens from children and adults. A genotype 2 cardiovirus was detected from a child who died of sudden infant death syndrome, and 2 untypeable cardioviruses were detected from 2 children with meningitis.

Figure

Human cardiovirus phylogeny including novel viruses from myocardial tissue and cerebrospinal fluid. A) The 798-nt complete viral protein (VP) 1 phylogeny, with genotypes indicated to the right. Vilyuisk virus was used as an outgroup. B) The 802-nt partial 5′ untranslated region phylogeny of genotype 2 human cardioviruses. C) The 489-nt complete leader, complete VP4 and partial VP2 phylogeny of genotype 2 human cardioviruses. Neighbor-joining phylogenies were calculated with MEGA5 (www.megasoftware.net) by using a percentage nucleotide distance substitution model with complete deletion of gaps and 1,000 bootstrap reiterations for confidence testing. Only bootstrap values >70% are shown at node points. Scale bars indicate percentage nucleotide distance. Novel viruses from this study (sudden infant death syndrome [SIDS] 347/10 and cerebrospinal fluid [CSF] 07/03981) are shown in boldface. Reference viruses are given with GenBank accession number and strain name (when available).