Tracking a Virus

Doctors at Carolinas Medical Center in Charlotte are planning to use a $1 million grant to study a virus that leads to hearing lose in one-out-of-10 people who contract it. And more than eight-out-of-10 adults will get that virus by the time they are 40 years old. The good news for adults is that it can go unnoticed. But babies aren’t so lucky. The infection is called congenital Cytomegalovirus or CMV and is spread to the child by the mother during pregnancy. And there’s no treatment for it. The goal of the study will be to track the infection in newborns and follow them with hearing tests for three years.