Medical News, April 10, 2007 GALVESTON -- The most common cause of infant hospitalization in the United States, respiratory syncytial virus, infects virtually all children by age two. Along with the influenza virus, RSV is a major contributor to the approximately two million infant deaths worldwide caused every year by respiratory infections, according to the World Health Organization. Worse yet, there's no safe and effective RSV vaccine available to prevent severe respiratory infections, and no specific antiviral therapy to treat them. For the past four decades, medical science thought it knew how this dangerous condition arose from such a common virus. Scientists blamed an overreaction in the lungs by specific immune-system cells, T lymphocytes (also known as "T cells"), for the infection. But now, researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston (UTMB), the State University of New York at Buffalo, the University of Chile, the Hospital Roberto del Rio in Santiago, Chile, the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, and MedImmune Inc. of Gaithersburg, Md., have turned that dogma on its head.