Unusual Features in Fatal Infectious Mononucleosis

Fatal airway obstruction in infectious mononucleosis.

A 20 year old man was brought to the casualty department having collapsed at home. The ambulance crew reported that he had suffered a cardiac arrest and since then had had no spontaneous respiration. He was being hand ventilated on arrival at hospital. On examination there was a good cardiac output but no spontaneous-movements and both pupils were fixed and dilated. Examination of the mouth sho...

The molecular characterization of fatal infectious mononucleosis.

We describe a retrospective study of 4 cases of sporadic fatal infectious mononucleosis (IM), 1 case of fatal IM, and 1 case of sporadic severe IM. Patients were 26 months to 17 years old; 3 were male. Five died of complications of IM. All 5 of these patients had the Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) present in examined tissue specimens; EBV was monoclonal in 3 patients and biclonal in 1. EBV clonality ...

Fatal infectious mononucleosis: a critical review.

Infectious mononucleosis, considered here to be the same as 'glandular fever', has been regarded as a very rare cause of death. However, the number of reports said to describe fatalities from this disease has increased considerably in recent years. In 1953, Leibowitz found 38 case reports in the literature. Later, Albuquerque (1966) was able to find 50. By the end of 1969 the disease had been r...

Fatal infectious mononucleosis with liver failure in two sisters.

Case 1. A girl aged 22 months was admitted to hospital with a history of swelling of the cervical glands on the right side of a few days' duration. There had been no response to oral penicillin, and the swelling had spread to the right side of the face. Both parents were well, the father Austrian and the mother British; there was a healthy brother aged 4 years. Only five weeks previously, a sis...

Glandular fever (infectious mononucleosis).