BACKGROUND Influenza is a major cause of morbidity and hospitalization among children. While less often reported in adults, gastrointestinal symptoms have been associated with influenza in children, including abdominal pain, nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea. METHODS From September 2005 and April 2008, pediatric patients in Indonesia presenting with concurrent diarrhea and influenza-like illness...

Influenza virus infection is with initial symptoms with fever, dry cough and muscle soreness. In some cases, influenza virus infection also brings complications with neurologic problems, heart diseases, hypoxemic respiratory failure, etc. Rhabdomyolysis, which precipitated by compression injury, alcohol ingestion or seizures, leads to acute kidney injury with myoglobinuria and elevated serum cr...

ISG15 functions as a critical antiviral molecule against influenza virus, with infection inducing both the conjugation of ISG15 to target proteins and production of free ISG15. Here, we report that mice lacking the ISG15 E1 enzyme UbE1L fail to form ISG15 conjugates. Both UbE1L(-/-) and ISG15(-/-) mice display increased susceptibility to influenza B virus infection, including non-mouse-adapted ...

BACKGROUND Live attenuated influenza H5N1 vaccines have been produced and evaluated in mice and ferrets that were never exposed to influenza A virus infection (Suguitan et al., Plos Medicine, e360:1541, 2006). However, the preexisting influenza heterosubtypic immunity on live attenuated H5N1 vaccine induced immune response has not been evaluated. METHODOLOGY AND PRINCIPAL FINDINGS Primary and...

The recovery of recombinant influenza A virus entirely from cDNA was recently described (9, 19). We adapted the technique for engineering influenza B virus and generated a mutant bearing an amino acid change E116G in the viral neuraminidase which was resistant in vitro to the neuraminidase inhibitor zanamivir. The method also facilitates rapid isolation of single-gene reassortants suitable as v...

OBJECTIVE To estimate the burden and age-specific rates of influenza-associated hospitalization in rural western Kenya. METHODS All 3924 patients with respiratory illness (defined as acute cough, difficulty in breathing or pleuritic chest pain) who were hospitalized between June 2007 and May 2009 in any inpatient health facility in the Kenyan district of Bondo were enrolled. Nasopharyngeal an...

BACKGROUND Studies that aimed at comparing the clinical presentation of influenza patients across virus types and subtypes/lineages found divergent results, but this was never investigated using data collected over several years in a countrywide, primary care practitioners-based influenza surveillance system. METHODS The IBVD (Influenza B in Vircases Database) study collected information on s...

BACKGROUND Influenza data gaps in sub-Saharan Africa include incidence, case fatality, seasonal patterns, and associations with prevalent disorders. METHODS Nasopharyngeal samples from children aged <12 years who were admitted to Kilifi District Hospital during 2007-2010 with severe or very severe pneumonia and resided in the local demographic surveillance system were screened for influenza A...

Amino acid substitutions within or near the active site of the viral neuraminidase (NA) may affect influenza virus fitness. In influenza A(H3N2) and B viruses circulating in Thailand between 2010 and 2015, we identified several NA substitutions that were previously reported to be associated with reduced inhibition by NA inhibitors (NAIs). To study the effect of these substitutions on the enzyma...

A quick genetic approach for the screening of influenza virus variants was developed in this laboratory (S. Zou, J. Clin. Microbiol. 35:2623-2627, 1997). It uses multiplex reverse transcription and multiplex PCR to amplify and differentiate the variable region of the hemagglutinin genes of different types and subtypes of influenza viruses. Variants within the same type or subtype are then ident...