Xinhuanet has the latest H7N9 figures from China's National Health and Family Planning Commission. With no new cases reported this month, and just one from July reported in last month's update, the 12 provinces or municipalities that have hosted infections resulted in:134 cases (I have 136; presumably the Taiwan case and asymptomatic Beijing boy)45 deaths, up form from last month87...
Concise overview of MERS from mid-2013...
Publishing in the Oman Medical Journal, Blakhair and colleagues summarized the state of play for MERS back in July 2013.While the numbers may have changed since then, the article is as relevant now as it was. Not much new data has been accrued to address the knowledge gaps listed in July despite 3-months and about 50 papers having passed.The final summary is particularity useful I thought...The...
The tip of the VirusBerg...
The VirusBerg.Click to enlarge. If there are more cases with mild/less symptomatic disease then the denominator growsand the proportion of deaths to survivors, the PFC,shrinks. At the start of an outbreak or emergence ofa new pathogen, it is usually the most severely ill orthose...
+1 to HA and NA numbering-new fruity bat flu
Now I need to remake this tree!Thanks to a new study in PLoS Pathogens by Tong and colleagues (they who brought us the last new influenza numbers from bats), we have a new haemagglutinin (HA) and a new neuraminidase (NA) to add to the list. These are also from a fruit bat (flat faced (Artibeus planirostris)...
Mycophenolic acid added to the study list of anti-MERS-CoV therapeutics?
In a recent online release from the Journal of Infection, Chan, colleagues from Kwok-Yung Yuen's group and collaborators describe their search for compounds with broad-spectrum activity against both influenza viruses and coronaviruses (CoVs); the latter being especially rare.Testing a pre-existing 1,280 compound panel of potential drugs yielded 10 hits with activity against MERS-CoV (EMC...
Does MERS-CoV delay the antiviral response against it?
Lau and colleagues from the University of Hong King recently wrote about MERS-CoV's ability to delay the induction of proinflammatory cytokines in human cells. These are potent defensive chemicals that cause and accelerate an inflammatory response to viral infection.While inflammation is part of kicking out the virus, it can get out of control, especially with more "foreign" viruses, like those that...
MERS-CoV, SARS-CoV, HCoV-229E: comparative culture and immunology
The following study in mBio by Kindler and colleagues from Switzerland, Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands came out in February but, as I'm trying to brush up for a talk next week, it's an important one to add to my recent list of quick reviews.The authors used human bronchial airway epithelium cultures (HAE), also known as air-liquid interface (ALI)* cultures, to grow and examine the immune...
The MERS-CoV receptor story to date..
The Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) coronavirus (CoV) uses the dipeptidyl peptidase 4 (DPP4; also called CD26) molecule as its cellular contact for entry into the host.The receptor was described in Nature by Raj and colleagues (led by Bart Haagman) in March 2013, part of a Dutch, German, Swiss and Saudi Arabian team. Some of this group, led by Christian Drosten, had...
Editor's Note #11: Blog biology...
Just like a living thing, if untended, a blog can fade away.At least mine did while I was away on holiday. There's always a cycle - the weekends are quite - but while I was away the (mostly) unique visitors stopped visiting. As you can see, VDU's blog doesn't get thousands of hits per...
How mice lie....
In a nice 9:40 video presentation to TEDMED 2013, H. Shaw Warren brings us up to speed on some of the shortcomings of using mice to understand our complex human immune responses to bacterial infection.Some key points he makes are:We use inbred mice. They "all look the same" because they are. That does not capture the diversity of responses to...
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is MERS-free...is it MERS-CoV free though?
An article on news site France24 notes that no MERS cases are to be found in the KSA ahead of the imminent commencement date of the hajj; a gathering of pilgrims that is already well under way.Great. And may that remain the case for the next few weeks.And I tend to agree that there will not be any "mass spread" of a virus that still does not show that potential.But the story avoids an important...
Low transmission potential for H7N9 that was....remains to be seen what will be
Chowell and colleagues mathematically model influenza A(H7N9) virus transmission in a new article in BMC Medicine.They conclude that the basic reproduction number (R; the average number of new cases arising from each exiting case) remained much less than 1 (0.1) for H7N9 infections, indicating the virus from earlier this year did not have pandemic potential. I guess we also know that now because we're...
H7N9 antibodies develop 21-days after viral load falls...
Lin and colleagues recently described in Clinical Infectious Diseases, the detection of anti-H7N9 antibodies in the first exported (from mainland China) human case of H7N9.The 53-year old male case in Taiwan (described previously) harboured a virus that was not fully susceptible to oseltamivir/zanamivir/peramivir 6-days after initiation of oseltamivir. This resistance was associated with...
Avian influenza A(H7N9) virus re-emergence risk factors...
Hard to believe it was over 6-months ago that we heard so much about H7N9. Papers are still coming out thick and fast describing all manner of aspects of the virus, its impact, transmission and ways to intervene in its replication.There have been no new cases reported since July and the tally remains at 136 (including Taiwan case) with 44 deaths.In a recent article...
Recent MERS-CoV weekly case activity...
This follows on from my last MERS-CoV-by-week post, September 19th. As you'll see, its been a comparatively quiet 3-weeks (3rd week is not yet over of course).With the hajj starting, that should be good news.These data include today's (the 10th of October for me Down Under) 2 new...
MERS-CoV update...
Click to enlarge. Schematic of the MERS-CoV. Feel free to use, please just cite Virology Down Under and Dr Ian M MackayNo major jump in Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) cases over the past 2 weeks. Great to see.In parallel to this slow-down in new announcements, the World...
