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Novel virus may have jumped from monkeys to humans

titiSM.jpgA viral outbreak at a California monkey research facility that killed 80% of the titi monkeys (right) it infected also sickened a researcher who worked closely with the animals, scientists reported on Friday at the Infectious Diseases Society of America conference in Vancouver, Canada (see news report in HealthDay).

The virus to blame appears to be a new species of adenovirus, says Charles Chiu, a virologist at the University of California, San Francisco, who led a study assessing the monkey epidemic. It’s also the best evidence to date that adenoviruses can jump species, Chiu says.

“Adenoviruses are very species-specific,” he told Nature today, but his team’s findings suggest that “it’s possible that adenoviruses are kind of an underappreciated agent of infectious disease.”

Adenoviruses are responsible for a wide assortment of respiratory, stomach and other ailments in humans – including diseases ranging from common cold and pneumonia to conjunctivitis and gastroenteritis.


Outbreaks in captive animal facilities are not rare, says Chiu, but the severity of this outbreak – which began at the California National Primate Research Center in Davis in May of 2009 and lasted about three months – was unusual.

Chiu and his team used a “virus chip”, an assay designed to detect both known and potentially novel viruses, and other techniques to identify the virus. Their results suggested that it had not been described before, and that it was the cause of pneumonia in the researcher who fell ill. (She did not require hospitalization and recovered in about four weeks.)

Juergen Richt, an expert in zoonotic diseases at Kansas State University, says it’s unclear that the virus really did cross species. “To conclude this was the agent [that caused the researcher’s disease] you have to have it isolated from the patient,” he says.

Still, he notes, 60% of emerging infectious diseases in humans are passed to humans from other species, and there is “absolutely” a potential for infection from agents that are so far unknown.

Chiu says that he and his authors will soon submit the findings to a peer reviewed publication. His group is now studying the serum of 1000 individuals to examine the virus’s prevalence in the human population.

While the jump they believe occurred from monkeys to the human researcher is no cause for alarm so far, “I think there’s an underappreciated diversity of viruses that can cause disease,” he says, and sampling animal viruses more intensively “is potentially a way to mitigate pandemics.”

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    Albert J. Haberle, DVM said:

    Virtually all foreign / exotic ‘living things’ can be expected to travel to new species and to new areas, eventually. The question is not ‘if’ this happens but ‘when’ will it happen. Then the difficult question is, ‘What will happen within the biological community so exposed.’

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    Happy said:

    I was looking erveyhewre and this popped up like nothing!

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