Xenotransplantation may be a solution to overcome the shortage of organs for the treatment of patients with organ failure, but it may be associated with the transmission of porcine microorganisms and the development of xenozoonoses. Whereas most microorganisms may be eliminated by pathogen-free breeding of the donor animals, porcine endogenous retroviruses (PERVs) cannot be eliminated, since th...

engraftment by donor lymphocytes in an immunologically compromised host can result in donor t-cell activation against host major histocompatibility complex antigens, with resultant gvhd. the acute form of gvhd (agvhd) is characterized by erythroderma, cholestatic hepatitis, and enteritis. the intestinal symptoms of agvhd include crampy abdominal pain and watery diarrhea, often with blood. the c...

BACKGROUND Little is known about the transmission of variant hepatitis C virus (HCV) genome through needlestick injuries. METHODS To demonstrate how HCV quasi species are transmitted and adapt to the new host in acute resolving infection, we analyzed the nucleotide and deduced amino acid sequences of the hypervariable region 1 (HVR-1) in the E2 domain of HCV in both the source of the virus ("...

Ly-49 molecules are used by NK cells to distinguish 'self' from 'non-self', but the determinants of Ly-49 expression that allow this distinction to be made are not understood. The education of NK cells for self/non-self recognition was studied in murine mixed allogeneic bone marrow chimeras, in which NK cells are of both host and donor origin. Marked alterations in Ly-49 receptor expression wer...

Epidemiological studies on Streptococcus pneumoniae show that rates of carriage are highest in early childhood and that the major benefit of the pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (PCV) is a reduction in the incidence of nasopharyngeal colonization through decreased transmission within a population. In this study, we sought to understand how anti-S. pneumoniae immunity affects nasal shedding of bac...

OBJECTIVE To determine how donor health status affects the risk of infection after corneal transplant. METHODS An adverse reaction surveillance registry was used to conduct a matched case-control study among transplanted donor corneas from January 1, 1994, to December 31, 2003. Cases comprised 162 reports of endophthalmitis after penetrating keratoplasty including 121 with microbial recovery,...

The development of graft-host tolerance after bone marrow transplantation (BMT) is crucial to avoid the problems of graft-versus-host disease (GVHD) and graft rejection. GVHD can be eliminated by depleting mature donor T cells from the BM inoculum, thereby facilitating the development of graft-host tolerance. However, T-cell depletion often results in an increased incidence of graft rejection a...

Cytosine-phosphorothioate-guanine oligodeoxynucleotides (CpG ODNs) are synthetic ODNs with unmethylated DNA sequences that mimic viral and bacterial DNA and protect against infectious agents and tumor challenge. We show that CpG ODNs markedly accelerated graft-versus-host disease (GVHD) lethality by Toll-like receptor 9 (TLR9) ligation of host antigen-presenting cells (APCs), dependent upon hos...