Cerebral palsy, one of the most common causes of serious long term disability, is a term covering the conditions found to have “non-progressive but often changing motor impairments secondary to lesions or anomalies of the brain arising during early development.”1 The final irreversible neurological damage frequently results from a causal pathway created by the joint effects of several factors including genetic constitution, fetal infection, preterm birth, and problems during delivery. The role of postnatal infection, such as catastrophic meningitis or encephalitis in infancy or early childhood, is usually clear, but the part played by infection in congenital or neonatal cerebral palsy is more complex and needs more investigation.2 A case-control study in this issue (p 76), reporting the prevalence of neurotropic viral nucleic acids in blood spots from routine neonatal screening, if confirmed, may take us a …