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The discovery that gut viruses can be transmitted from mouse pups to their mothers in saliva during breastfeeding reveals previously unrecognized sites of viral replication and means of viral transmission.
Elizabeth A. Kennedy is in the Division of Infectious Diseases, Department of Medicine, Edison Family Center for Genome Sciences & Systems Biology, Washington University School of Medicine, St Louis, Missouri 63110, USA.
Megan T. Baldridge is in the Division of Infectious Diseases, Department of Medicine, Edison Family Center for Genome Sciences & Systems Biology, Washington University School of Medicine, St Louis, Missouri 63110, USA.
Gastrointestinal viruses such as norovirus and rotavirus spread with impressive efficiency, causing more than 300 million childhood infections worldwide each year1. These viruses can cause a range of unpleasant symptoms, including abdominal pain, diarrhoea and vomiting. They are thought to be spread almost exclusively through the faecal–oral route, in which a person ingests tiny particles of stool or vomit that have either come directly from an infected person or have contaminated food and water. But writing in Nature, Ghosh et al.2 present intriguing evidence of salivary infection routes for gastrointestinal viruses, indicating that measures to contain viral spread might require enhanced sanitation techniques.