Journal of clinical virology : the official publication of the Pan American Society for Clinical Virology
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Herpes zoster (HZ) is a common condition that affects all age groups and both immunocompetent and immunocompromised individuals. However, it mainly impacts elderly and immunocompromised people and is associated with important and sometimes permanent detriment to quality of life and activities of daily living. ⋯ Despite increasing knowledge of the pathology causing PHN, the management modalities for acute HZ pain and PHN remain inadequate. Public, and probably physician, understanding of HZ and its complications is poor, potentially leading to low utilisation of HZ vaccination and delayed presentation for treatment.
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Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever (CCHF) is a zoonotic viral disease that is asymptomatic in infected livestock, but a serious threat to humans. Human infections begin with nonspecific febrile symptoms, but progress to a serious hemorrhagic syndrome with a case fatality rate of 2-50%. ⋯ The disease is one of the most widely distributed viral hemorrhagic fevers occurring in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and some parts of Europe. In this study, we have focused on the CCHF situation in Iran and neighboring countries and provide evidence of over 5000 confirmed cases of CCHF in a single period/season.
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A primary maternal infection with cytomegalovirus (CMV) either during or just before pregnancy accounts for the majority of congenital infections where the baby is symptomatic at birth. Following a primary maternal infection, depending on gestational age, between one quarter and three quarters of fetuses will become infected, and approximately one-third of infected fetuses will have symptoms at birth. Experiments using animal models of CMV infection and observational studies in humans indicate that administration of a CMV hyperimmune globulin (HIG) to the pregnant woman with a primary CMV infection should be effective for both the treatment and prevention of fetal infection. The HIG probably acts by reducing placental inflammation, neutralizing virus with high avidity antibodies, and perhaps by reducing cytokine mediated cellular immune responses.
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Herpesviruses may cause substantial complications after lung transplantation. Especially their interaction with lung tissue cells may result in adverse effects for the transplant patients, and may lead to severe end organ disease or to chronic transplant rejection and to development of bronchiolitis obliterans (BOS). ⋯ In the following a short overview will be given about the different herpesviruses and their possible influence on the transplanted lung as well as about a method to determine the original virus load at the air surface of the lung. The quantitative data achieved by this method underline that some herpesviruses are often present at much higher levels at the air surface of the transplanted lung than in the blood, and that their influence on transplant survival may have been substantially underestimated so far.
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Human metapneumovirus (hMPV) was discovered in 2001 as a causative agent of respiratory disease in young children, immunocompromised individuals and the elderly. Clinical signs of hMPV infection range from mild respiratory illness to bronchiolitis and pneumonia. ⋯ The studies in rodent and non-human primate models look promising, but none of the vaccine candidates has been tested yet in human volunteers. Here we give an overview of the immunogenicity and protective efficacy of a variety of live attenuated, virus vectored, inactivated virus and subunit vaccines that have been tested in animal models.