How rotavirus infection accelerates autoimmune diabetes in a mouse model -- ScienceDaily

NOD (for non-obese diabetic) mice are prone to develop diabetes, and
infection with rotavirus accelerates onset of the disease. Barbara
Coulson and colleagues, from The University of Melbourne, Australia,
tested the hypothesis that the virus does this by inducing bystander
activation .

Bystander activation assumes that a foreign intruder
(in this case rotavirus) provokes a strong but non-specific activation
of the immune system, and that this heightened state of activation
"spills over" to a subset of specific immune cells that can recognize
and attack not the viral intruder but some of the body's own cells, in
this case the insulin-producing islet cells in the pancreas.