Hepatitis C virus (HCV) is a highly mutable RNA virus and circulates as a heterogeneous population in individual patients. The magnitude of such population heterogeneity has long been proposed to be linked with diverse clinical phenotypes, including antiviral therapy. Yet data accumulated thus far are fairly inconclusive. By the integration of long RT-PCR with 454 sequencing, we have built a pi...

Abstract Background: Adult T-cell leukemia/lymphoma (ATLL) is caused by human T-cell lymphotropic virus type-1 (HTLV-1).  HTLV-1 oncogenes can induce malignancy through controlled gene expression of cell cycle checkpoints in the host cell. HTLV-I genes play a pivotal role in overriding cell cycle checkpoints and deregulate cellular division. In this study, we aimed to determine and comp...

Risks for sexually transmitted HIV may be related to concentrations of virus detected in semen and previous research shows a small to moderate association between viral load in blood and semen. This study examined the association between viral load in semen and plasma in a community sample of HIV-infected men and is the first study to examine semen viral load in relation to sexual transmission ...

An inexpensive enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay method for human immunodeficiency virus type 1 quantitation, ultrasensitive p24 antigen assay (Up24), was compared with RNA viral load assay (VL). Up24 had 100% sensitivity of detection at a viral load of >/=30,000, with sensitivity of 46.4% at a viral load of <30,000 (232 specimens from 65 seropositive subjects). The assay was highly reproducibl...

At present there is limited understanding of the host immune response to (low pathogenic) avian influenza virus infections in poultry. Here we develop a mathematical model for the innate immune response to avian influenza virus in chicken lung, describing the dynamics of viral load, interferon-α, -β and -γ, lung (i.e. pulmonary) cells and Natural Killer cells. We use recent results from experim...

We present a simplified dynamical model of immune response to uncomplicated influenza A virus (IAV) infection, which focuses on the control of the infection by the innate and adaptive immunity. Innate immunity is represented by interferon-induced resistance to infection of respiratory epithelial cells and by removal of infected cells by effector cells (cytotoxic T-cells and natural killer cells...

BACKGROUND Highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) results in an improvement in immunologic function. We sought to investigate the factors associated with increases in CD4 cell count among human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-positive antiretroviral-naive patients starting HAART. METHODS Five hundred ninety-six subjects were followed for a median of 2.5 years (interquartile range, 1.0-4.0 ...

Disease progression in HIV-infected individuals varies greatly, and while the environmental and host factors influencing this variation have been widely investigated, the viral contribution to variation in set-point viral load, a predictor of disease progression, is less clear. Previous studies, using transmission-pairs and analysis of phylogenetic signal in small numbers of individuals, have p...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the role of parvovirus B19 (B19), varicella zoster virus (VZV), and human herpes virus 6 (HHV-6) in the aetiopathology of giant cell arteritis (GCA). METHODS Temporal artery biopsy specimens from 57 patients with GCA and 56 controls were investigated. DNA was obtained by biopsy, and quantitative real time polymerase chain reaction assay performed to establish the prevale...

A new quantitative-competitive PCR-based human immunodeficiency virus type 2 (HIV-2) proviral DNA assay (QC-PCR) was developed and used to determine the proviral load in HIV-2-infected individuals. Proviral load varied considerably, with means of 1,831 copies per 10(6) peripheral blood mononuclear cells for asymptomatic subjects (n = 19) and 2,587 for AIDS patients (n = 2). HIV-2 viral and prov...