Déjà Vu All Over Again: Koch’s Postulates and Virology in the 21st Century

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Abstract
In this issue of theJournal, Martin et al [1] report the results of a prospective longitudinal cohort study of acute respiratory illness in children who attended daycare. This article describes prolonged shedding of the recently identified human bocavirus (HBoV) by children and detection of HBoV in the absence of respiratory symptoms. Their findings argue against the hypothesis that HBoV is a primary respiratory pathogen, leaving the biological significance of HBoV infection in question. The work also nicely illustrates a common problem facing modern virologists: how to assign disease causality to a microorganism that is not amenable to Koch's postulates. Molecular discovery techniques have identified numerous viruses that, like HBoV, have yet to be definitively established as pathogens.