When you have retinitis because of CMV, your doctor may give you strong medications intravenously (through a vein) for a couple of weeks, a process called induction therapy. After a while, they may switch you to pills.

You might have medication injected into your eye if your vision is in danger.

Your doctor might prescribe drugs including:

• Cidofovir (Vistide)
• Foscarnet (Foscavir)
• Ganciclovir (Cytovene)
• Valganciclovir (Valcyte)

These drugs generally can't cure the disease if you have advanced HIV, but they can control it while you get antiretroviral therapy (ART) for your HIV infection.

Depending on the medicine, you could have side effects including:

• Low white blood cell count (neutropenia), which raises your chance for other infections
• Feeling tired from low red blood cell count (anemia)
• Upset stomach or throwing up
• Rash
• Kidney problems

Most important, if you take ART early in an HIV infection, the drugs will keep it from getting worse and will keep you from getting CMV in the first place.

Cytomegalovirus Complications

It’s rare, but CMV can cause complications including:

• Mononucleosis
• Guillain-Barre syndrome
• Brain inflammation (encephalitis)
• Heart inflammation (myocarditis)

In people with HIV, complications include:

• Retinitis
• Pneumonia
• Skin rashes and lesions
• Problems in the nerves, esophagus, lungs, colon, or mucous membranes
• Brain swelling

Complications in babies born with CMV include:

• Learning problems
• Cerebral palsy or trouble with muscle tone and coordination
• Seizures

Cytomegalovirus Outlook

There’s no cure for CMV. The virus stays inactive in your body and can cause more problems later. This reactivation is most common in people who’ve had stem cell and organ transplants.

Your outlook depends on your overall health. In people who have strong immune systems, CMV symptoms almost always go away on their own.

Congenital CMV can have lifelong effects. The risks are highest when the mother has their first CMV infection during a pregnancy.

If you have a weakened immune system, you might need treatment for the rest of your life to prevent complications

You can have cross-contaminations if the different virus samples come in contact with the sample surface. It will be good to use different sample holding plates for each type of sample or to do UV sterilization of the surfaces after each sample.

Christian, you can detect various viruses (SARS-CoV-2, HIV, CMV etc.) on the same automated platform, for either diagnostic or monitoring purposes. Molecular detection methods (I assume that your platform uses some kind of target amplification for viral load quantification, e.g. (RT)-qPCR, or isothermal amplification) are specific and properly validated methods should pose you no cross-detection problems with your various targets. It is already for some time that several commercial platforms enable the detection or viral load quantification for multiple viruses. Good laboratory practices should be used in order to properly identify samples (avoid mix-ups) and avoid cross-contamination between them, since these are the most common problems that lead to erroneous results in diagnostic lab settings.