In this review, immune response and possible causes of depletion of CD4 + T-cell counts in patients with human immunodeficiency (HIV)-1 infection, have been documented. HIV has been recognized as a global problem; however, the developing countries are the most affected by epidemic diseases. Countries in the sub-Saharan Africa seem to bear the bulk of the HIV burden among the developing countrie...

BACKGROUND The cause of the high HIV prevalence in sub-Saharan Africa is incompletely understood, with heterosexual penile-vaginal transmission proposed as the main mechanism. Heterosexual HIV transmission has been estimated to have a very low probability; but effects of cofactors that vary in space and time may substantially alter this pattern. METHODS To test the effect of individual variat...

BACKGROUND Enterovirus (EV) 71 is the main pathogen associated with hand, foot and mouth disease (HFMD) or herpangina. Outbreaks of HFMD caused by EV71 infection are associated severe neurological disease and high mortality rates in children. Several sporadic cases of EV71 infection occurred in the Republic of Korea (ROK) in 2000, and EV71 infections were not reported thereafter until 2006. In ...

Iceland is free of the major infectious diseases of horses. However, in 2010 an epidemic of respiratory disease of unknown cause spread through the country's native horse population of 77,000. Microbiological investigations ruled out known viral agents but identified the opportunistic pathogen Streptococcus equi subsp. zooepidemicus (S. zooepidemicus) in diseased animals. We sequenced the genom...

Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) is the most common co-infection in HIV patients and a serious co-epidemic. Apart from increasing the risk of reactivation of latent tuberculosis (TB), HIV infection also permits opportunistic infection of environmental non-pathogenic mycobacteria. To gain insights into mycobacterial survival inside host macrophages and identify mycobacterial proteins or processe...

The 2014 epidemic of the Ebola virus is governed by a genetically diverse viral population. In the early Sierra Leone outbreak, a recent study has identified new mutations that generate genetically distinct sequence clades [1]. Here we find evidence that major Sierra Leone clades have systematic differences in growth rate and reproduction number. If this growth heterogeneity remains stable, it ...

Neutrophils are immune cells that are well known to be present during many types of lung diseases associated with acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) and may contribute to acute lung injury. Neutrophils are poorly studied with respect to viral infection, and specifically to respiratory viral disease. Influenza A virus (IAV) infection is the cause of a respiratory disease that poses a sig...

To investigate the potential role of non-human primates (NHPs) in a dengue virus (DENV) epidemic, we conducted serological and genomic studies using plasma samples collected from 100 cynomolgus monkeys (Macaca fascicularis) in an animal breeding facility in the Philippines. An ELISA revealed 21 monkeys with a positive IgM reaction and 19 positive for IgG. Five of the monkeys were positive for b...

SRC kinases and PKR are intracellular protein kinases, which play key roles in intracellular viral replication. In this research, the effect of SRC kinase inhibition and PKR activation and inhibition on replication of coxsakievirus (CVB3), an entrovirus of the family picornaviridae – causative agents of fatal myocarditis, was studied. Vero and Hela cells were cultured and infected with CVB3 in ...

The 2014 epidemic of the Ebola virus is governed by a genetically diverse viral population. In the early Sierra Leone outbreak, a recent study has identified new mutations that generate genetically distinct sequence clades [1]. Here we find evidence that major Sierra Leone clades have systematic differences in growth rate and reproduction number. If this growth heterogeneity remains stable, it ...