Parechovirus infections in babies in New South Wales, Australia

The parechoviruses (HPeVs; par -echo-virus) don't make the headlines too often. I'm not sure why but I expect it is mostly because they are (a) not frequently sought and (b) not frequently found. That last point is a matter of perspective though as we see in a report on the...

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Rhinovirus (RV) transmission by aerosol: does it happen or is transmission solely by hand-contact and self-inoculation?

I'll be writing a few posts over the coming weeks based in the papers I've found on this topic of RV transmission. How applicable these study results are to transmission of other respiratory viruses is unknown.The focus will be on answering the question of "Do rhinoviruses transmit by...

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Stuff from the literature: very SARS-like coronavirus in Chinese horsehoe bats...

The smoking bat for SARS-CoV?Xing-Yi Ge and colleagues from China, USA, Australia and Singapore described some new severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)-like coronaviruses (SL-CoVs) in bats, publishing in Nature last month.These discoveries were especially notable (not that any new...

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Dutch researchers in collaboration with Qatar are at work sequencing MERS-CoV from camels...

And from the WHO comes confirmation of some of my earlier bits and pieces about the MERS-CoV in camels story from earlier....The three camels which have tested positive with #MERS in #Qatar were detected in a barn linked to two confirmed human infections� WHO (@WHO) November 28, 2013Further,...

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New influenza A(H7N9) virus case in

Chinanews reports a new infection by H7N9 today.A 57-year old male was confirmed as positive 27-Nov and is in hospital in Hangzhou, the largest city in Zhejiang province. Zhejiang province was the hot spot for H7N9 earlier in the year.This is the 141st case of H7N9 which emerged in 2013 in south east China. Most of the recent cases have been in Zh...

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Clustered camel coronavirus cases...

Adding significant weight to the camel-as-vector hypothesis, stories here,  and here are being reported of a collaborative study between the Qatari Supreme Council of Health, the Qatari Ministry of Environment, the Netherlands� Health Ministry�s National Public Health Institute, the Erasmus Medical...

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MERS by the numbers: monthly MERS

Click on image to enlarge.Cases (numbers on the y-axis; left) including deaths (green) and fatal cases (red) are shown for each month (x-axis, bottom) of2012 and 2013. This includes 68 deaths and 161 total cases. The Hajj occurred in October of each year.These two charts show the number...

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MERS-CoV by the numbers: recent weekly case activity...

Click on image to enlarge.Confirmed MERS-CoV cases including fatal infections (green) and deaths (red) each week. Case numbers are listed on the y-axis (side), days of each week  along the x-axis (bottom). Case dates are derived from...

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The MERS-CoV case slience has fallen lifted thanks to the WHO

Well, apart from a blatant Dr Who references, this post is dedicated to providing a huge portion of back-patting for the great job the World Health Organisation (WHO) have done on their recent Disease Outbreak News reports (see yesterday's here). I now have a new colour code in my Excel sheet that indicates "confirmed by WHO" - because its become worthwhile doing that. The current approach to...

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No symptoms but still shedding virus?

Click on image to enlarge.A stylized trace of the temperatures during a PCR cycle.D-denaturation, when primers and double-strandedDNA (dsDNA) are reverted to single strands of DNA; A-annealing, when primers bind to their complementarytarget and DNA re anneals to form...

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