Acute human bocavirus infection in MDS patient, Cologne, Germany

The human bocavirus (HBoV) was discovered in 2005 in respiratory secretions of children suffering from clinical symptoms of viral respiratory infections [1]. Since then the virus has been clinically associated with respiratory infections worldwide and cannot be distinguished fromother respiratory viruses on clinical observations alone. The situation becomes more complicated as the virus is frequently detected as one of two or more pathogens and thus it remains unclear if a distinct clinical course is indeed caused by HBoV or whether HBoV is only a bystander [2–4]. This latter statementmust in full consequence lead to the conclusion that alsoother viruses that are detected in concert with other pathogens are only blindpassengers rather than truepathogens, but forHBoV themodified Koch’s postulates have not been formally fulfilled due to the lack of an animal model [2–4]. The co-detections originate on the onehand from the fact thatmoderndiagnosticsmore andmore rely on rapid multiplex assays which detect more pathogens in parallel than ever before. Thus the more questions are being asked, the more answers are produced by a single assay, and in earlier times the multiple infections have simply not been detected due to technical limitations [5–8], Second, we and others have previously shown that HBoV is likely to persist and therefore could be