All the herpes family causes tons of health problems, HSV 1 & 2, EBV, Citomegalovirus .... (some of that problems recently discovered but also the main suspect in many other diseases)
50-90% of the US population are EBV or CMV positive yet it’s a much smaller percentage that develop autoimmune illnesses.
I’m the farthest thing from a rheumatologist but it seems like the favored explanation is a combination of infection and abnormal immune response.
I believe the evidence for autoimmune disorders is much weaker (with the caveat that this is well outside my scope of practice), I’ve heard it being implicated in MS from my neurology colleagues but my understanding is it’s a weak correlation at the moment. I can’t offer more than uneducated conjecture on other autoimmune diseases. UpToDate says the following:
“One difficulty in proving a link between EBV and MS is that serological evidence of EBV can be found in 83 to 90 percent of adults in the Western hemisphere [99,101,102]. On the other hand, EBV seropositivity among adult MS patients is near 100 percent, significantly higher than healthy controls [91,102-106]. Additionally, children with MS are significantly more likely than healthy peers to have serological evidence for prior EBV infection, at an age when EBV seropositivity is much less common than in adults [107]. However, there is conflicting evidence concerning the presence of EBV in brain tissue of patients with MS [108-111].”
same deal
I've been reading into how they establish latentcy and in what cell types. They can infect almost any cell and establish latentcy, they prefer some cells that do not undergo apoptosis, near the brain.
There isn't enough funding in the area either.