So that last post is out of date already.The Qatari Supreme Council of Health, as it does, has issued an announcement through the media (it has yet to update it's technically troubled website) announcing the death of the previously described 29-year old male with asthma who had been confirmed by an international (presumably UK-based) reference laboratory.Asthma occurs in about 5% of the...
Tunisian father was MERS-CoV positive...
A retrospective diagnosis by the US CDC has confirmed that the father of a MERS-CoV-positive brother and sister in Tunisia (FluTracker's Cases: #42-35-year old female; 34-year old male) was indeed positive for the CoV as well. There was also a mention in BMJ of this cluster.Earlier testing had not been able to confirm that the father, despite him being a probable case, had transmitted the virus...
More MERS molecular masterfulness: Egyptian camels contain lots of anti-MERS-CoV antibodies [AMENDED]
Perera and colleagues from China, Japan, Egypt and the United States report in Eurosurveillance that they have found a high prevalence of Egyptian camels with antibodies to a piece of the Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) spike protein.The group looked at 1,343 human sera (815...
MERS-CoV and deaths rise....[UPDATE]
The latest Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) Ministry of Health (MOH) announcement (Arabic only for now) provides scarce detail on 4 new cases including 2 deaths.30-year old, Riyadh, health care worker (HCW), in an intensive care unit (ICU)47-year old, Hafr Al Batin, multiple comorbidities, contact ("Mkhalt") of another case, in an intensive care unit (ICU)41-year old, Riyadh, HCW, fatal infection79-year...
H7N9 in wild birds...a review of the literature
Not by me though., This was a review just published in EID Bird flyways that may contribute to H7N9 spread.by Olson and colleagues.They found 48 published studies that listed findings of influenza A virus haemagglutin type H7, or neuramonase N9 viruses as well as H9N2. The prevalence was calculated as...
New coronavirus genomes....not MERS yet
Unfortunately they aren't MERS-CoV genomes.Nonetheless, a whole lot of new feline, porcine, murine, SARS, 229E and HKU1, genomes have been directly released from the J. Craig Venter Institute.These now appear on GenBank with non-sequential accession numbers around the KF272920-KF530271. The sequences were produced using next generation sequencing technology.Looks like the virome is in the sights of...
Measles, vaccination and infectious disease communication in Queensland...
With measles cases prominent in the news of late, there have been a few interesting reports and interviews from Queensland's local Acting Senior Director for Communicable Diseases, Dr Stephen Lambert.Measles virus, has a basic reproduction number (R0) - the average number of new cases from each contact - of 12-18. This defines measles as one of the most contagious infectious diseases of...
MERS-CoV cases..updated chart highlighting umrah 2013 peak period
Click to enlarge. Data from the date of announcement (Ministry of Heath, KUNA, WHO or another media source) rather than date of disease onset.This chart highlights a slight plateau in cases for several weeks starting in early August, and the subsequent rise in cases per week as the region exited the...
MERS-CoV by the numbers: recent global case numbers by week
Click to enlarge.Confirmed MERS-CoV cases (green) and deaths (red) each week. Case numbers arelisted on the y-axis, days of each week alongthe x-axis.While the week has not ended, it is interesting to sum up where we are in terms of MERS case announcements. During the week beginning August...
New MERS-CoV case, a death, in Qatar
The Kuwait News Agency (KUNA) reports that a 56-year old female has died of MERS in Qatar, according to the Qatar's Supreme Council of Health (SCH).This is the 2nd death from a Qatari-based infection and the 1st female case. She had several comorbidities. In this instance, comorbidities may serve as reminder that the apparent sex bias in MERS cases (more often males)...
A scientist who knows how to communicate - and isn't bad with the vaccines either
Kim Stephens has written a nice piece in my local 'paper', brisbanetimes.com.au, on Prof Ian Frazer's latest vaccine achievement. You may know Prof Frazer from such things as...the anticancer human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine, a safe, highly effective but underutilized (in some parts at least) vaccine recommended for kids aged 11 or 12.Anyone...
Got a spare $6.3-billion? Experts could use it to discover the missing 320,000+ mammalian viruses we don't yet know about
...or just $1.4-billion for 85% of those. And that's not including the non-mammalian ones. This is according to a new paper in mBio today by Andrew and colleagues from a collaborative team including Prof Ian Lipkin, from Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. The study advocates for a much more structured, systematic approach to discovery and...
How MERS may be SARS, but we don't really know
On July 26th, Prof Christian Drosten wrote in Lancet Infectious Diseases about some similarities and differences between the diseases Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), each linked to a zoonotic coronavirus (CoV) infection.Drosten is senior author of the 2 publications papers describing gold-standard MERS-CoV laboratory diagnostic methods, all...
New MERS-CoV positives - is there a brevity competition going on...a shortage of electrons perhaps?
2 MERS-CoV POS, 26 and 19 years, released from hospital.That is the only relevant text from 68 Google translated press release words on these 2 new cases posted on the Arabic language Ministry of Health website, Saudi Arabia. 56 words on the English-language site. I used half as many just explaining where it came from.2 other cases were announced as positive and already discharged (the...
Ways in which seasonal and pandemic influenza infections differ
In commenting on another article in the American Journal of Pathology but Gao et al, Kevin Hartshorn nicely summarizes some of the possible reasons why a pandemic influenza kills otherwise healthy young adults more often than a seasonal influenza does. The answer is as complex as the milieu of interactions between viral proteins and nucleic acids and...
Is there a better smoking bat or camel?
That teensy fragment of Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) sequence (yes, I called it a fragment of that virus) from a Taphozous perforatus bat caused a lot of hassle last week,certainly a disproportionate amount to it's representation of only 0.5% of a MERS-CoV genome. Similarly,...
New Ross River virus page starts up
And I do mean starts....not much there yet but will fill in as time permits.It will be over on the main VDU site...http://www.uq.edu.au/vdu/VDURossRiverVirus....
