On episode #228 of the science show This Week in Virology, Vincent visits the University of California at Berkeley and speaks with Britt Glaunsinger and Eva Harris about their work on Kaposi’s sarcoma associated herpesvirus and dengue virus. You can find TWiV #228 at www.microbe.tv/twiv.
Hemorrhagic fevers are among the most graphic viral diseases, inspiring movies, novels, and a general fear of infection. They are characterized by an abrupt onset and a striking clinical course involving bleeding from the nose and mouth, vomiting with blood, and bloody diarrhea. The most famous hemorrhagic fevers are produced by infection with filoviruses like …
A new rhabdovirus from a patient with hemorrhagic fever Read More »
Marburg virus has been isolated from Egyptian fruit bats (Rousettus aegyptiacus) living in Kitaka Cave, Uganda, demonstrating that bats are a natural reservoir of the virus. Marburg virus, the founding member of the Filoviridae, is an enveloped virus with a negative-strand RNA genome. Other members of the filovirus family are the five species of ebolavirus. Filoviruses …
A new member of the arenavirus family, Lujo virus, has been identified in patients who died during an outbreak of hemorrhagic fever in late 2008. Sequence analysis reveals that Lujo is a new arenavirus, genetically distinct from other members of the family which includes Lassa virus. A patient with unexplained hemorrhagic fever was identified in …
Lujo virus, a new hemorrhagic fever virus from Southern Africa Read More »
In an NYTimes Op-Ed article called “The Scary Caterpillar”, Jeffrey Lockwood wrote about potential use of a virus as a weapon of bioterrorism: What if a terrorist group announced that their operatives had introduced Rift Valley fever into the United States? This mosquito-borne disease would make West Nile virus look like a case of the …
