Is mono a kids' virus only?
Ask the doctor
Q. Is mononucleosis an infection that occurs only in children and teenagers, or can it affect adults as well?
A. It's necessary to distinguish between the illness, mononucleosis (mono), and the virus that most often is the cause of the illness, Epstein-Barr virus (EBV). Most human beings become infected with EBV early in life, typically in their teenage years. Once we are infected, the virus remains in our bodies for the rest of our lives. It lies "asleep" inside some of our cells, periodically "reawakening" to multiply and go on to infect other cells, and then it settles down again.
For the vast majority of us, when we first become infected, the virus causes just sniffles or no symptoms at all, according to research. Some people (a minority) develop mono, an illness that typically lasts a few weeks and then goes away. In a very few people, usually years after the initial infection, the virus can trigger several different kinds of cancer.
It's unclear why one virus accounts for such a wide spectrum of illness. The general answer is that we are all genetically programmed to respond to an infection with a particular microbe in a particular way, that the genetic program is different in each of us, and that the way our body responds to the microbe defines the illness.
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