What Caused All These Troubles, Anyway? Epstein-Barr Virus In Sjogren's Syndrome Reevaluated

摘要

The inflammatory autoimmune and autoinflam-matory rheumatic diseases share the persistent, pernicious, and currently depressing feature that they are largely idiopathic. Their true environmental origins remain unknown (or at least there is no general consensus regarding causation), despite the extraordinary efforts made to date and the awesome capabilities of modern science. Of course, there are exceptions to such a gross generalization. Knowing that the host response to streptococci is responsible for rheumatic fever, for example, seems to have contributed to our therapeutic success with this disease and its demise as a public health scourge, despite the many important details that remain unexplained about the relationship of this bacterium to the host response and the vagaries of disease expression.