Viral pathogens

Diagnosis of plant viral pathogens

In the last ten years there has been an explosion in plant virus outbreaks, because of either direct or indirect activities of humans. The ease of transporting plant materials and virus vectors, and collecting relatives of crop plants from the wild, has spread viruses widely throughout the world. The most important step in managing a virus disease is correct identification. Tests for diagnosis ...

Viral Pathogens in Multiple Sclerosis

P HYSICIANS AND PATIENTS HAVE ALWAYS HAD A great fascination with the invisible pathogen. Koch’s criteria, set out as early as 1882, have generally been ignored, that is, a microorganism must be (1) present in every case of the disease and (2) isolated from the host with the disease and grown in pure culture, (3) the specific disease must be reproduced when a pure culture of the microbe is inoc...

Surveillance of viral pathogens in Australia

Varicella-zoster virus causes two distinct clinical diseases. Primary infection causes varicella or chickenpox in children and reactivation of infection causes herpes zoster (shingles) mostly among the elderly. The virus is a member of the herpesvirus family, restricted in its infective range to humans. Although chickenpox and shingles have been recognised for centuries, changes in population d...

Global Screening for Human Viral Pathogens

We propose a system for continuing surveillance of viral pathogens circulating in large human populations. We base this system on the physical isolation of viruses from large pooled samples of human serum and plasma (e.g., discarded specimens from diagnostic laboratories), followed by shotgun sequencing of the resulting genomes. The technology for concentrating virions from 100-L volumes was de...

Removal of Viral Pathogens from Calf Serum by Gamma Irradiation Techniques