After infection with poliovirus, only about 1% of individuals develop paralysis. I have always wondered whether genetic polymorphisms underlie the rarity of this disease outcome. The results of study carried out in Denmark provide the first insights.
by Gertrud U. Rey The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is currently experiencing its worst outbreak of Ebola virus disease in history. More than 3,000 people have been infected with the virus, and nearly 1,900 have died since the outbreak began in 2018.
Mice are important animal models for studying human pathogens, but they have limitations: not all human viruses replicate in mice and often these animals do not reproduce aspects of disease and immune responses. Mice implanted with human bone marrow, liver, and thymus (BLT mice) develop human immune systems, but most pathogens infect other cell types. …
In the 19th century the word ‘virus€™ was used to describe the cause of any contagious disease. How it came to describe the very small intracellular parasites that we know today is a fascinating story that illustrates our evolving concepts of infectious agents. Long before bacteria, fungi, and viruses were identified, it was known that …
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention thinks that viruses play a role in the childhood paralysis called acute flaccid myelitis (AFM). The finding of antibodies to enterovirus D68 (EV-D68) in the cerebrospinal fluid of patients with AFM strengthens the link between infection with this virus and AFM. Acute flaccid myelitis (AFM), which mainly occurs …
RNA viruses exist close to their error threshold, the point beyond which additional mutations cause loss of infectivity. It has been suggested that RNA recombination prevents viruses from exceeding the error threshold – a situation called error catastrophe – but there has been little experimental support for this hypothesis. An analysis of poliovirus RNA synthesis …
