Abundant evidence supports a viral etiology for Paget's disease of bone (PD), however, an
infectious virus has not been isolated from PD patients. Thus, it is unclear how the virus is
maintained for the many years that the disease persists in patients. We considered if a
primitive multipotential hematopoietic stem cell (HSC), which is self-renewing, passes the
virus to its differentiated progeny and serves as a reservoir for the pathogen. If a primitive
stem cell harbored measles virus (MV), then other hematopoietic lineages derived from this …