Gene/Protein Disease Symptom Drug Enzyme Compound
Pivot Concepts:   Target Concepts:
Query: EC:2.7.7.49 (reverse transcriptase)
 31,746 document(s) hit in 31,850,051 MEDLINE articles (0.00 seconds)

A 48-year-old-man returned to the Netherlands from Sierra Leone and was admitted with nausea, crampy abdominal pain, myalgia, arthralgia, headache and watery diarrhoea. This was the first case of Lassa fever diagnosed in the Netherlands since 1980. Despite treatment with ribavirin, the patient died on the 16th day of illness. Prompt diagnosis of Lassa fever is critical for the timely administration of ribavirin which improves diagnosis considerably, and for the timely implementation of isolation measures. Recently, a reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) has become available for the rapid diagnosis of acute Lassa fever, which was implemented to diagnose this patient.
 ...
PMID:[A man with fatal Lassa fever following a stay in Sierra Leone]. 1246 60

Lassa fever (LF) is a viral hemorrhagic disease which affects one-fourth to two million people annually with the fatality rate of about 10,000. It is associated with sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL) usually at the convalescent stage. Recently, cases of SNHL at the acute phase have been reported. This study was done to further investigate the incidence and features of SNHL in acute phase of LF. It is a prospective case-control study of LF patients seen with acute SNHL conducted between July 2007 and April 2009 at Irrua Specialist Teaching Hospital Nigeria. The diagnosis of acute LF was based on the clinical features and detection of IgM antibodies and/or positive Lassa virus-specific reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction using primers S36+ and LVS 339 while SNHL was diagnosed clinically and confirmed with PTA and speech discrimination tests. Patients with other acute febrile illnesses were used as control. Statistical analysis was done using SPSS version 11 and Fisher's exact test while level of significance was set at p < 0.05. Out of the 37 confirmed cases of LF, 5 (13.5%) and none (0%) of the control developed early-onset SNHL (p = 0.03). Forty percent of the cases studied had negative IgM. The audiograms showed involvement at all frequency groups with pure tone average 65-85 dB and the speech discrimination 20-40%. The overall case fatality rate was 27.0%, and for early SNHL cases 60.0% (p > 0.05). The incidence of SNHL in LF infection is about 13.5% and could be a reflection of a worse disease process. There is possibility of direct viral invasion aside immunological reaction as a causative mechanism.
 ...
PMID:Early-onset sensorineural hearing loss in Lassa fever. 2080 63

It is rare both to have the central nervous system (CNS) as the main focus in the acute phase of Lassa fever infection without associated bleeding, and to find Lassa virus (LAV) in the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) but not in the serum. We report the case of a 38-year-old Nigerian woman with mainly CNS manifestation of Lassa fever. She was admitted twice within 11 days because of persistent fever. A clinical diagnosis of acute LAV encephalitis was made because of a high index of suspicion and CNS involvement confirmed by positive reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) for LAV in the CSF, while her blood was repeatedly negative for LAV by RT-PCR test. She recovered fully following supportive care coupled with treatment with an 18-day course of ribavirin, and suffered no long-term neurological complication or relapse. Post-treatment CSF examination by RT-PCR did not detect LAV.
 ...
PMID:Acute Lassa Virus Encephalitis with Lassa Virus in the Cerebrospinal Fluid but Absent in the Blood: A Case Report with a Positive Outcome. 3005 42

Fifty patients with unexplained fever and poor outcomes presented at Irrua Specialist Teaching Hospital (ISTH) in Edo State, Nigeria, an area endemic for Lassa fever, between September 2018 - January 2019. After ruling out Lassa fever, plasma samples from these epidemiologically-linked cases were sent to the African Centre of Excellence for Genomics of Infectious Diseases (ACEGID), Redeemer's University, Ede, Osun State, Nigeria, where we carried out metagenomic sequencing which implicated yellow fever virus (YFV) as the etiology of this outbreak. Twenty-nine of the 50 samples were confirmed positive for YFV by reverse transcriptase-quantitative polymerase chain reaction (RT-qPCR), 14 of which resulted in genome assembly. Maximum likelihood phylogenetic analysis revealed that these YFV sequences formed a tightly clustered clade more closely related to sequences from Senegal than sequences from earlier Nigerian isolates, suggesting that the YFV clade responsible for this outbreak in Edo State does not descend directly from the Nigerian YFV outbreaks of the last century, but instead reflects a broader diversity and dynamics of YFV in West Africa. Here we demonstrate the power of metagenomic sequencing for identifying ongoing outbreaks and their etiologies and informing real-time public health responses, resulting in accurate and prompt disease management and control.
 ...
PMID:Real-time Metagenomic Analysis of Undiagnosed Fever Cases Unveils a Yellow Fever Outbreak in Edo State, Nigeria. 3208 31