Virus and breast cancer?

The viral cause of epithelial cancer has been a controversial topic throughout the last few decades. While there are certain cancers where this has been confirmed, such as HPV and cervical cancer, there are many others where the data is still a little hazy. Many times reports of finding animal viruses in human cancers were later chown to be merely PCR contamination. There needs to be more compelling direct evidence that HMTV is actually causing disease, and not just a lot of correlation. I like cancer research that is out of the box, but I also think that there is a heavy responsibility not to over-state the claims before there is solid, direct evidence.

Curtis:
Thank you posting this very interesting topic. This one is been debated in my formal lab for the longest time whether there is a HMTV. Since we worked on MMTV-wnt1 mice, and wnt1 locus is one of the most common integration site of MMTV, we always talked about whether there is a HMTV. There is also a course that Dr. Paul Lambert taught to discuss how to show a virus is causal vs. a passenger. A few things must be established. The first clue is an epidemological correlation, particularly if cancer incidence is extraordinary high in a particular region (which the article try to establish). Example is liver cancer and Heptitis B in southeast asia. Then one must perform a koch's test. Example is establishing a coronavirus can cause SARS: "to meet Koch's postulates which stipulate that a pathogen must meet four conditions: it must be found in all cases of the disease, it must be isolated from the host and grown in pure culture, it must reproduce the original disease when introduced into a susceptible host, and it must be found in the experimental host that was so infected" This is extremely hard for cancer, since cancer is multistages. For breast cancer it's just too many ways to create a breast cancer.