Merkel Cell Polyomavirus and Merkel Cell Carcinoma, France

of the fi rst diagnosed case (in Spain) in a human with aseptic meningitis.lence of West Nile virus neutralizing an-tibodies in colonial aquatic birds in southern Spain. and performance testing of quantitative real time PCR assays for infl uenza A and B viral load measurement. Detection and differentiation of pathoge-nicity of avian paramyxovirus serotype 1 from fi eld cases using one-step reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction. A new fl uorogenic real-time RT-PCR assay for detection of lineage 1 and lineage 2 West Nile viruses. fl avivirus universal primer pairs and development of a rapid, highly sensitive hemin-ested reverse transcription-PCR assay for detection of fl aviviruses targeted to a conserved region of the NS5 gene sequences. To the Editor: Merkel cell carci-noma (MCC) is a primary cutaneous neuroendocrine tumor. This aggressive skin cancer is uncommon but increasing in frequency. During 1986–2001, incidence rate tripled; average annual increase was 8% (1). MCC shares epi-demiologic features with Kaposi sarco-ma, a malignant tumor associated with human herpesvirus 8 infection (2). In particular, MCC affects predominantly immunocompromised patients such as organ transplant recipients (3,4), patients with B-cell lymphoid tumors (5), and patients with AIDS (6). This similarity between MCC and Kaposi sarcoma may support the hypothesis of an infectious origin of MCC. A new polyomavirus, provisionally named Merkel cell polyomavirus (MCPyV), has been recently identi-fi ed in tumor tissue from patients with MCC. Furthermore, clonal integration of viral DNA within the tumor genome was observed in most of the cases (7). To assess the implication of MCPyV in MCC, we tested tumor biopsy samples collected from 9 patients with MCC. Patient median age was 65 years, and 2 patients were immunocompromised (patient 1 had a lymphoma, which was treated with rituximab; patient 7 had psoriatic rheumatism, which was treated with corticosteroids and meth-otrexate). As controls, biopsy samples from 15 patients with diverse prolifer-ative or infl ammatory skin or mucosa lesions were tested (Table). DNA was extracted from fresh tissue samples by using the QIAamp DNA Mini Kit (QIAGEN, Courta-boeuf, France) according to the manu-facturer's instructions. Paraffi n was removed from previously formalde-hyde-fi xed, paraffi n-embedded biopsy samples with xylene, and the samples were rehydrated with decreasing concentrations of ethanol. The extracts were tested for MCPyV DNA by PCR using 3 sets of primers initially described by Feng et al. (7) to target the predicted T-antigen (LT1 and LT3 primer pairs) and the viral capsid (VP1 …