RSV is a common respiratory virus. People get reinfected many times over the course of their lives and usually only experience cold-like symptoms. For young children and older adults, however, RSV infection can be life-threatening. Every year in the U.S., about 58,000 children under age 5 are hospitalized due to RSV infection, and from 100 to 500 die. The virus also kills about 14,000 older adults every year.
López and colleagues previously discovered that RSV, as it multiplies, makes some nonfunctional copies of its genome. These defective viral genomes are missing crucial sections, so they can’t form new infectious viruses, but they do trigger a strong antiviral immune response. To find out whether the presence of defective viral genomes affects how sick people get, López collaborated with co-corresponding author Christopher Chiu, MD, PhD, of Imperial College London, Shaon Sengupta, MBBS, from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and co-first authors Sébastien A. Felt, PhD, now a postdoctoral researcher at Washington University, and Yan Sun, PhD, now an assistant professor at the University of Rochester Medical Center, among others.
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Nature Microbiology. Study Paper:
advice please coping with relative with severe emphysema
update: tomorrow I’m at the hospital for suspected head & neck cancer
Bronchiectasis diagnosis
sudden Bronchiectasis exacerbation.
Organising pneumonia - how soon do the steroids kick in?
