How Hepatitis C Spreads

You may have heard of hepatitis C (HCV or hep C), the potentially deadly virus that causes liver inflammation. HCV often produces no symptoms until it reaches an advanced stage, which makes it hard to know you’ve been infected. However, if you understand the ways in which hep C spreads, you can take precautions to reduce your risk of contracting this virus.

What is hepatitis C?

Hepatitis, in general, refers to liver inflammation. Many things can cause liver inflammation, including toxic chemicals, medications and drug or alcohol abuse. These types of hepatitis sometimes clear up on their own and may not even require treatment.

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Source: healthguides.healthgrades

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The Current State of Diagnostics for Meningitis and Encephalitis

Infections of the central nervous system (CNS) such as meningitis or encephalitis can be caused by myriad microorganisms and may be life-threatening. Patients with acute CNS infections generally present with similar findings of fever, headache, and neurological changes. Given the similarity in symptomology, it is often difficult to distinguish bacterial and viral infection based on clinical presentation alone. As a result, obtaining a rapid and accurate diagnosis is important for proper patient management. Indeed, rapid identification of CNS pathogens is critical for antimicrobial treatment in cases of bacterial or herpes simplex virus (HSV) infection. Any delays in appropriate therapy can lead to poor patient outcomes, including death.

The aim of this Continuing Education article is to review the current landscape for diagnostic testing of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) in acute CNS infections, present the potential impact of rapid identification, and discuss methods to increase the diagnostic yield in uncertain cases. It is anticipated that new technologies will aid in providing rapid and accurate pathogen identification, potentially leading to better patient outcomes, improved antimicrobial stewardship, and decreased hospital costs.

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Novel test can detect any virus

Scientists have designed a test that can detect not only any known virus type and subtype but also virus outbreaks.

A research team led by the Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis (WUSTL) condensed nearly 1 billion base pairs of viral DNA sequences to create a test that they call ViroCap.

“With this test, you don’t have to know what you’re looking for. It casts a broad net and can efficiently detect viruses that are present at very low levels. We think the test will be especially useful in situations where a diagnosis remains elusive after standard testing or in situations in which the cause of a disease outbreak is unknown,” said research associate Professor Gregory Storch.

To develop the test, the researchers targeted unique stretches of DNA or RNA from every known group of viruses that infects vertebrates – including 2 million unique stretches of genetic material. The stretches of material were used as probes which can pluck out viruses from a sample and find a genetic match. The matched viral material was then analyzed by high-throughput genetic sequencing.

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New test can detect any virus that infects vertebrates

Source: labnews

Combined HIV-Hepatitis C Vaccine Soon Preventing Co-Infection

Some 2.3 million people around the world are infected with both HIV and the hepatitis C virus (HCV) at the same time. The two are often intertwined, with HCV being the top cause of death aside from AIDS for co-infected patients. While there are currently vaccines for both hepatitis A and hepatitis B, there is no vaccine for hepatitis C. Likewise, HIV/AIDS treatment has improved significantly in recent decades, but there is still no vaccine.

In a new study, researchers note that a combined HIV and hepatitis C vaccine may soon be on the horizon. The study, which was presented at The International Liver Congress in Barcelona, describes how a combined vaccine would involve two main steps: first, exposing the immune system to adenoviral vectors that contain fragments of both HCV and HIV viruses, which would trigger antigens; and afterwards, administering booster vaccinations in an MVA vector containing the same HCV and HIV virus fragments.

“Finding effective vaccinations against the world’s biggest killers is a huge and pressing problem,” said Laurent Castera, Secretary General of the European Association for the Study of the Liver, in a statement. “This study shows for the first time that it is possible to generate simultaneous immune response against diseases HCV and HIV, raising the possibility of a combined vaccination.”

HIV, or the human immunodeficiency virus, causes HIV infection and over time, acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). HCV is also a viral infection that mostly targets the liver, resulting in symptoms of fever, dark urine, stomach pain, and eventually liver disease, cirrhosis (scarring of the liver), or liver failure.

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While HIV and hepatitis C vaccines are still in experimental stages, researchers may have paved

the way for a combined vaccine in which they're administered at the same time.

Source: Josep Lago / Getty

Disposing HIV from human immune cells with new gene-editing technique.

They've managed to shut down HIV replication permanently.

Using the much-touted CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing method, scientists have demonstrated how they can edit HIV out of human immune cell DNA, and in doing so, can prevent the reinfection of unedited cells too.

If you haven’t heard of the CRISPR/Cas9 gene-editing technique before, get ready to hear a whole lot more about it in 2016, because it’s set to revolutionise how we investigate and treat the root causes of genetic disease. It allows scientists to narrow in on a specific gene, and cut-and-paste parts of the DNA to change its function.

CRISPR/Cas9 is what researchers in the UK have recently gotten approval to use on human embryos so they can figure out how to improve IVF success rates and reduce miscarriages, and it’s what Chinese scientists were caught using in 2015to tweak human embryos on the down-low.

Earlier this year, scientists started using CRISPR/Cas9 to successfully treat a genetic disease - Duchenne muscular dystrophy - in living mammals for the first time, and now it’s showing real potential as a possible treatment for HIV in the future.

Read more: Disposing HIV from human immune cells with new gene-editing technique.

An HIV-infected T-cell.

Source: NIAID/Flickr

HIV life cycle: How HIV infects a cell and replicates itself using reve...

HIV life cycle -- how HIV infects a cell and replicates itself using reverse transcriptase and the host's cellular machinery.

From the 2007 Holiday Lectures. AIDS -- Evolution and Epidemic.

Howard Hughes Medical Institute, HHMI's BioInteractive Animations.

Video source: http://tinyurl.com/khx39v6

Your viruses could reveal your travel history, and much more.

The genomes of two distinct strains of the virus that causes the common lip cold sore, herpes simplex virus type 1, have been identified within an individual person --an achievement that could be useful to forensic scientists for tracing a person's history. The research also opens the door to understanding how a patient's viruses influence the course of disease.

Most people harbor HSV-1, frequently as a strain acquired from their mothers shortly after birth and carried for the rest of their lives. The new discovery was made with the help of a volunteer from the United States. The research revealed that one strain of the HSV-1 virus harbored by this individual is of a European/North American variety and the other is an Asian variety -- likely acquired during the volunteer's military service in the Korean War in the 1950s.

"It's possible that more people have their life history documented at the molecular level in the HSV-1 strains they carry," said Derek Gatherer, a lecturer in the Division of Biomedical and Life Sciences at Lancaster University in the United Kingdom and a member of the research team, which also includes scientists at Georgia State University, the University of Pittsburgh, and Princeton University.

Read more: Your viruses could reveal your travel history, and much more.

This is a reconstruction of a herpes simplex virus capsid, based on data from electron microscopy studies.

Source: sciencedaily

Ebola Virus - Amplification-free direct detection on a hybrid optofluidic platform

Low-complexity detection of infectious diseases with high sensitivity and specificity is urgently needed, especially in resource-limited settings. Optofluidic integration combines clinical sample preparation with optical sensing on a single chip-scale system, enabling the direct, amplification-free detection of single RNA from Ebola viruses. The optofluidic system fulfills all key requirements for chip-based clinical analysis, including a low limit of detection, wide dynamic range, and the ability to detect multiple pathogens simultaneously.

Illustration of a virus and blood cells (Shutterstock)

Introduction

The recent Ebola and Zika outbreaks [1, 2] have made it clear that viral infections continue to pose diverse and widespread threats to humanity. Resource-limited settings, in particular, call for diagnostic devices and technologies that are robust and feature relatively low complexity for easy handling by potentially unskilled personnel. At the same time, such instruments need to fulfill all the technical requirements for accurate and reliable diagnosis. These include a limit of detection and dynamic range that are compatible with clinically observed viral loads as well as the ability to carry out multiplexed differential detection by screening simultaneously for several pathogens with similar clinical symptoms.

Figure 1. (a) Cross-sectional view of liquid-core ARROW. (b) Schematic of Automaton integrated with ARROW chip. (c) A hybrid optofluidic ARROW system. (d) Digitized fluorescence signal counts above background. (e) Concentration-dependent RNA counts for off-chip (open squares) and using the automaton (solid circles) sample preparation. Negative controls (SUDV, MARV) did not create any counts. Dashed line indicates predicted particle count determined from initial concentration and experimental parameters. EBOV, Zaire Ebola virus; MARV, Marburg virus; SUDV, Sudan Ebola virus. (Adapted from Cai et al., 2015 [12])

The 'gold standard' test for hemorrhagic fevers as well as other infectious diseases is real-time polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) [3]. PCR fulfills the sensitivity and specificity requirement for clinical testing. However, it is not ideal for resource-limited environments and point-of-care applications because of to its complexity. An alternative economic and portable option is antigen-capture enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) testing. However, ELISA requires more highly concentrated samples and thus its clinical application, especially for early disease detection, is restricted.

For the last two decades, the lab-on-chip approach, which features a small footprint and sample volume, has been considered as a promising candidate for the next generation low-complexity medical diagnostics [4]. Among all the approaches, optofluidics, which integrates optics and microfluidics in the same platform, has received increased attention [5, 6]. Microfluidics is ideal for performing biological sample processing on a chip-scale level and leads to miniaturization and simplification of the current diagnostic system. If it can be integrated with an optical sensing/read-out platform that enables high detection sensitivity down to the single pathogen level, an analytic system for which nucleic acid amplification is no longer needed becomes possible.

Figure 2. (a) Schematic of multi-mode interferometer (MMI) waveguide intersecting with liquid-core ARROW. (b) Excitation spots, 9 (blue), 8 (green), and 7 (red), generated by the MMI at wavelength of 488nm, 553nm and 633nm, respectively. (c) Optical signal detected from various labelled single virus particles. (Adapted from Ozcelik et al., 2016 [14])

In order to detect single molecular biomarkers and bioparticles, an in-flow based detection scheme is preferred. In a typical in-flow detection scheme, bioparticles are transported to the sensing region in a stream of gas or liquid where they are detected in transient fashion as they pass an optical interrogation region [7, 8]. Therefore, fast read-out of the optical signal from single bioparticles in sequence can be achieved, and many concerns associated with traditional surface-based sensing schemes such as unwanted nonspecific binding, probe photobleaching, and diffusion-limited transportation are eliminated.

Read more: Ebola Virus - Amplification-free direct detection on a hybrid optofluidic platform

Source: cli-online.com