Killer virus identified
“The causative agent of the disease… may be a rodent-borne arenavirus related to the lassa fever virus of West Africa,” the NICD’s Dr Lucille Blumberg told the SA Press Association (SAPA).
A report by SAPA quoted Blumberg saying tests done by the NICD and the Centres for Disease Control in Atlanta, US indicated that the disease seemed to be a kind of arenavirus.
Arenaviruses cause chronic infections in multimammatic mice – a kind of wild mouse – who excrete the virus in their urine which can then contaminate human food or house dust.
Viruses similar to the lassa fever virus have been found in rodents in Africa, but other than in West Africa, have not been found to cause diseases in humans.
Therefore further tests still need to be done to find out whether this current strain is an undiscovered member of the arenavirus and what its distribution is.
Blumberg said a female nurse and a male paramedic were currently in isolation after having been in contact with those who previously died from the illness. They had shown symptoms of the disease.
The paramedic has since been diagnosed with kidney stones and Blumberg said it was “less likely” that he had the virus.
The nurse is “highly suspect” and is receiving anti-viral medication.
She was presently stable, but Blumberg could not say how her condition was likely to progress.
Author
Health-e News is South Africa's dedicated health news service and home to OurHealth citizen journalism. Follow us on Twitter @HealtheNews
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Unless otherwise noted, you can republish our articles for free under a Creative Commons license. Here’s what you need to know:
You have to credit Health-e News. In the byline, we prefer “Author Name, Publication.” At the top of the text of your story, include a line that reads: “This story was originally published by Health-e News.” You must link the word “Health-e News” to the original URL of the story.
You must include all of the links from our story, including our newsletter sign up link.
If you use canonical metadata, please use the Health-e News URL. For more information about canonical metadata, click here.
You can’t edit our material, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style. (For example, “yesterday” can be changed to “last week”)
You have no rights to sell, license, syndicate, or otherwise represent yourself as the authorized owner of our material to any third parties. This means that you cannot actively publish or submit our work for syndication to third party platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. Health-e News understands that publishers cannot fully control when certain third parties automatically summarise or crawl content from publishers’ own sites.
You can’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually.
If you share republished stories on social media, we’d appreciate being tagged in your posts. You can find us on Twitter @HealthENews, Instagram @healthenews, and Facebook Health-e News Service.
You can grab HTML code for our stories easily. Click on the Creative Commons logo on our stories. You’ll find it with the other share buttons.
If you have any other questions, contact info@health-e.org.za.
Killer virus identified
by Health-e News, Health-e News
October 12, 2008