Deadly New Virus Uncovered In Africa
A piece of genetic detective work by an international team has uncovered a deadly virus not seen before that likely caused a small isolated outbreak of acute hemorrhagic fever in central Africa in the summer of 2009.
The researchers were in an international consortium comprising the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), the US company Microbiota, and other institutions and organizations in America and Africa.
Deep Sequencing Reveals BASV
Initial tests for known viruses on blood samples taken from the survivor revealed nothing. But eventually, after more members of the consortium got involved, further genetic tests uncovered a completely new virus.
"BASV was present in the blood of the lone survivor at a concentration of over a million copies per milliliter. The genome of BASV, assembled from over 140 million sequence reads, reveals that it is very different from any other rhabdovirus," write the authors.
No other rhabdovirus is known to cause the acute, rapid and deadly hemorrhagic fever seen in the three cases in the Congo. For example, rabies can be deadly if untreated, but it doesn't progress in the rapid and deadly fashion seen with BASV.
"Identifying deadly unknown viruses, such as Bas-Congo virus, gives us a leg up in controlling future outbreaks," he adds.
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