Wiemels JL, et al. - Given the recent report that congenital cytomegalovirus (CMV) infection confers risk for childhood acute lymphocytic leukemia, researchers investigated if it is possible to detect clinically apparent CMV infection before hematological malignancy. For this purpose, they used high quality Swedish population-based registries. For hematological malignancies but not for central nervous system tumors, they detected an increased hazard ratio of CMV-related infections, adjusting for congenital malformations, deformations, and chromosome abnormalities, on analyzing all CMV infections registered earlier than 6 months before malignancy diagnosis. Findings revealed higher CMV incidence for children seemingly exposed via maternal CMV infection during pregnancy with the index child.