Could a Virus Cause Autism?

For some individuals, autism begins at conception, when an infected sperm cell transmits a virus to the egg: that is the provocative new hypothesis of a group in Italy based on data from brain tissue and semen.Last year, Antonio Persico and colleagues reported that traces of polyomaviruses — a family of common viruses that can cause tumors — are more likely to crop up in postmortem brain tissue of individuals with autism than in that of healthy controls. In unpublished work, the researchers have also found that seminal fluid from fathers of children with autism is more likely to carry polyomavirus than is fluid from fathers of healthy children.How a sperm might transmit a virus, and how the virus would then cause autism is unclear, which makes some experts deeply skeptical.Read more at...SFARI, March 2011.