From the New Scientist:
Three people have died and another is seriously ill with a previously unknown strain of a virus carried by a common African rodent. The virus requires close contact to spread, but experts warn that more like it could be circulating.
A 36-year-old woman on a small farm outside the Zambian capital Lusaka developed flu-like symptoms in early September. When they worsened she was taken by air ambulance to South Africa, where she died.
Alarms were raised after the ambulance paramedic and the nurse who attended her also died after developing similar symptoms two weeks later. The nurse who tended the paramedic is also in a serious condition.
On Sunday South Africa's National Institute for Communicable Diseases announced that the victims were infected by an arenavirus, one of a family of viruses carried by rodents.
"They are very widespread," says Bob Swanepoel, former head of the NICD and one of the world's leading experts on haemorrhagic viruses. In Africa, arenaviruses are carried, with no symptoms, by the multimammate mouse, a common farm pest sold in Europe as a "pocket pet".
Read more ....
No comments:
Post a Comment