Gene/Protein Disease Symptom Drug Enzyme Compound
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Query: UMLS:C0021051 (immunodeficiency)
 71,517 document(s) hit in 31,850,051 MEDLINE articles (0.00 seconds)

Following the devastating effects of blood-transmitted human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), blood establishments have become increasingly vigilant for the emergence or re-emergence of new threats to the safety of the blood supply. Many agents have fulfilled the broad definition of emerging blood-transmitted infections, including West Nile virus (WNV), Trypanosoma cruzi, Plasmodium spp., Babesia spp., parvovirus B19, dengue virus, and the prions that cause variant Creutzfeld-Jacob disease (vCJD). Other agents such as human herpes virus-8 (HHV-8-Kaposi's sarcoma virus) and Borellia (Lyme disease) and, perhaps, avian flu virus, are known to have a viremic phase, but have not yet been proved to be transfusion-transmitted. In the wake of these threats, transfusion services use a variety of donor screening interventions, including serologic assays, nucleic acid assays, and geographic exclusions based on potential exposure. The ultimate safeguard may be a pre-emptive pathogen inactivation strategy that will disrupt all nucleic acid-containing agents (though not prions). Considerable effort and resources have been invested in this arena, but currently no single technique is effective for inactivation of both liquid and cellular blood products and toxicity issues have not been completely resolved. The blood supply is remarkably safe with the risk of major pathogens such as hepatitis C virus (HCV) and HIV now reduced to less than one transmission per 2 to 3 million exposures. However, to approach near-zero infectious disease risk for emerging and re-emerging pathogens, new strategies such as pathogen inactivation or multi-pathogen microarray technology will need to be developed or refined.
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PMID:Emerging infectious diseases that threaten the blood supply. 1719 45

Recent experiences of emerging infections, such as severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and avian influenza (H5N1), have highlighted the risks of serious pulmonary infections from occupational exposures. Occupationally acquired human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection could also result in life-threatening, opportunistic lung infections as a result of host immunosuppression. These three occupationally acquired infections are major public health problems that carry with them enormous economic and societal implications. The present review discusses their microbiology, epidemiology and mode of transmission, clinical features, treatment and, more importantly, prevention. Health care workers (HCWs), who are a valuable health care resource especially in the developing nations, are at high risk for acquiring these diseases. Drugs for the treatment of HIV infection are expensive and not widely available in the developing world where they are most needed. As there is no well-recognised effective treatment for SARS and avian influenza, prevention of infection is most important. HCWs should be aware of occupationally acquired infections and know how to protect themselves. Regular training should be provided by all health care institutions on infection control measures and the use of personal protective equipment.
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PMID:Emerging occupational lung infections. 1760 45

Several sub-Saharan militaries have large percentages of troops with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome. With the arrival of avian influenza in Africa, the potential exists that some of those soldiers might also become infected with H5N1, the virus responsible for the disease. Two possible scenarios have been postulated regarding how such a coinfection of HIV and H5N1 might present. (1) Soldiers already weakened by HIV/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome rapidly succumb to H5N1. The cause of death is a "cytokine storm," essentially a runaway inflammatory response. (2) The weakened immune system prevents the cytokine storm from occurring; however, H5N1 is still present, replicating, and being shed, leading to the infection of others. A cytokine storm is particularly dangerous for individuals of military age, as evidenced by the large number of soldiers who died during the 1918 influenza epidemic. If large numbers of sub-Saharan soldiers suffer a similar fate from avian influenza, then military and political instability could develop.
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PMID:Avian influenza: potential impact on sub-Saharan military populations with high rates of human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome. 1769 90

Two main types of safety procedures must be applied to biological products, including plasma derivatives: (i) preventive procedures and (ii) elimination procedures. Prevention includes epidemiological control of donor populations; checks on each donor's health condition; analysis of each donation for the main pathogens using serological methods; additional analysis of all plasma for human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), hepatitis B virus (HBV), hepatitis C virus (HCV), hepatitis A virus (HAV) and the B19 virus, using nucleic acid amplification techniques (NAT). A 60 days or longer inventory hold of all plasma donations is applied, to allow additional time to discard previous donations from potential seroconverting or otherwise rejectable donors. Elimination procedures minimize the low residual risk of transmitting pathogens, including unknown or previously undetected ones. Since the introduction 20 years ago of solvent-detergent treatment, very effective against enveloped viruses (HIV, HBV, HCV, West Nile virus, SARS, avian influenza virus etc), there have been no known cases of transmission of this type of pathogens by products manufactured according to this procedure. Other inactivation procedures such as pasteurization, dry-heat or nanofiltration may prove equally effective. In addition, dry-heat treatment and nanofiltration are capable of effectively eliminating non-enveloped viruses (HAV, B19 virus). Recent studies show that the B19 virus is much more sensitive to heat (in lyophilized state or by pasteurization) and acid pH than previously thought. Although there is no evidence for the transmission of classic transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs) through blood or blood-products transfusion, four possible cases have been reported in the United Kingdom involving transmission by non-leukoreduced blood components of the agent that causes variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD), a disease linked to the outbreak of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) which took place in that country. However, there are no cases of human TSE (classic or variant) transmission by plasma-derived products. Analytical methods capable of detecting the vCJD agent in patients' brains (where high titres are found) and other tissues (such as the spleen, appendix and lymph nodes, where much lower concentrations are found) are unable to detect the agent in blood or plasma from patients with vCJD, even in the clinical phase of the disease. Experiments by Grifols and other groups show that the capacity of the production processes to eliminate vCJD agent models is many orders of magnitude greater than the maximum expected load of the agent. In this regard, the efficacy of precipitation, affinity chromatography, depth filtration and nanofiltration are particularly notable.
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PMID:Safety procedures of coagulation factors. 1807 96

The problem of biological security raises alarm due to the real growth of biological threats. Biological security includes a wide scope of problems, the solution of which becomes a part of national security as a necessary condition for the constant development of the country. A number of pathogens, such as human immunodeficiency virus, exotic Ebola and Lassa viruses causing hemorrhagic fever,rotaviruses causing acute intestinal diseases, etc. were first discovered in the last century. Terrorist actions committed in the USA in 2001 using the anthrax pathogen made the problem of biological danger even more important. In Russian Federation, biological threats are counteracted through the united state policy being a part of general state security policy. The biological Security legislation of Russian Federation is chiefly based on the 1992 Federal Law on Security. On the basis of cumulated experience, the President of Russia ratified Basics of Russian Federation's State Policy for Chemical and Biological Security for the Period through 2010 and Beyond on 4 December, 2003. The document determines the main directions and stages of the state development in the area of chemical and biological security. The Federal target program Russian Federation's National Program for Chemical and Biological Security is being developed, and its development is to be completed soon in order to perfect the national system for biological security and fulfill Basics of Russian Federation's State Policy for Chemical and Biological Security for the Period through 2010 and Beyond, ratified by the President. The new global strategy for control over infectious diseases, presented in the materials of Saint Petersburg summit of the Group of Eight, as well as the substantive part of its elements in Sanitary International Standards, are to a large degree an acknowledgement of the Russian Federation's experience and the algorithm for fighting extremely dangerous infections. This Russia's experience has resulted in the following global achievements: smallpox elimination in the USSR (1936); the USSR's suggestions on the program of smallpox elimination in the world and 2 billion doses of the vaccine transferred to the possession of the WHO (since 1958); the global elimination of the disease (1980); effective control over avian influenza at the epizootic stage, recognized internationally at Beijing International Congress, 17-18 January, 2006.
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PMID:[Important issues of biological safety]. 1822 6

Furin is a ubiquitously expressed proprotein convertase (PC) that plays a vital role in numerous disease processes including cancer metastasis, bacterial toxin activation (e.g. anthrax and Pseudomonas), and viral propagation (e.g. avian influenza and human immunodeficiency virus). To identify small molecule inhibitors of furin and related processing enzymes, we performed high-throughput screens of chemical diversity libraries utilizing both enzyme-based and cell-based assays. The screens identified partially overlapping sets of compounds that were further characterized for affinity, mechanism, and efficacy in additional cellular processing assays. Dicoumarols were identified as a class of compounds that inhibited furin non-competitively and reversibly with Ki values in the micromolar range. These compounds inhibited furin/furin-like activity both at the cell surface (protecting against anthrax toxin) and in the secretory pathway (blocking processing of the metastasis factor membrane-type 1 matrix metalloproteinase/MT1-MMP) at concentrations close to Ki values. Compounds tested exhibited distinct patterns of inhibition of other furin-family PCs (rat PACE4, human PC5/6 and human PC7), showing that dicoumarol derivatives might be developed as either generic or selective inhibitors of the PCs. The extensive clinical use, high bioavailability and relatively low toxicity of dicoumarols suggests that the dicoumarol structure will be a good starting point for development of drug-like inhibitors of furin and other PCs that can act both intracellularly and at the cell surface.
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PMID:Inhibition of furin/proprotein convertase-catalyzed surface and intracellular processing by small molecules. 1933 39

The majority of newly emerging diseases are zoonoses caused by pathogens transmitted directly or indirectly through arthropod vectors to humans. Transmission chains leading to human infection frequently involve intermediate vertebrate hosts, including wildlife and domestic animals. Animal-based surveillance of domestic and wild animals for zoonotic pathogens is a global challenge. Until recently, there has been no scientific, social, or political consensus that animal-based surveillance for zoonotic pathogens merits significant infrastructural investment, other than the fledgling efforts with avian influenza. National institutions charged with strategic planning for emerging diseases or intentional releases of zoonotic agents emphasize improving diagnostic capabilities for detecting human infections, modifying the immune status of human or domestic animals through vaccines, producing better antiviral or antibacterial drugs, and enhancing human-based surveillance as an early warning system. With the exception of human vaccination, these anthropocentric approaches target post-spillover events, and none of these avenues of research will reduce the risk of additional emergences of pathogens from wildlife. Novel schemes for preventing spillover of human pathogens from animal reservoir hosts can spring only from an understanding of the ecological context and biological interactions that result in zoonotic disease emergence. Although the benefits derived from investments to improve surveillance and knowledge of zoonotic pathogens circulating among wildlife reservoir populations are uncertain, our experience with human immunodeficiency virus and the pandemic influenza inform us of the outcomes that we can expect by relying on detection of post-spillover events among sentinel humans. Mt Sinai J Med 76:421-428, 2009. (c) 2009 Mount Sinai School of Medicine.
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PMID:Surveillance and control of zoonotic agents prior to disease detection in humans. 1978 54

Since DNA sequencing techniques first became available almost 30 years ago, the amount of nucleic acid sequence data has increased enormously. Phylogenetics, which is widely applied to compare and analyze such data, is particularly useful for the analysis of genes from rapidly evolving viruses. It has been used extensively to describe the molecular epidemiology and transmission of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), the origins and subsequent evolution of the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)-associated coronavirus (SCoV), and, more recently, the evolving epidemiology of avian influenza as well as seasonal and pandemic human influenza viruses. Recent advances in phylogenetic methods can infer more in-depth information about the patterns of virus emergence, adding to the conventional approaches in viral epidemiology. Examples of this information include estimations (with confidence limits) of the actual time of the origin of a new viral strain or its emergence in a new species, viral recombination and reassortment events, the rate of population size change in a viral epidemic, and how the virus spreads and evolves within a specific population and geographical region. Such sequence-derived information obtained from the phylogenetic tree can assist in the design and implementation of public health and therapeutic interventions. However, application of many of these advanced phylogenetic methods are currently limited to specialized phylogeneticists and statisticians, mainly because of their mathematical basis and their dependence on the use of a large number of computer programs. This review attempts to bridge this gap by presenting conceptual, technical, and practical aspects of applying phylogenetic methods in studies of influenza, HIV, and SCoV. It aims to provide, with minimal mathematics and statistics, a practical overview of how phylogenetic methods can be incorporated into virological studies by clinical and laboratory specialists.
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PMID:Use of phylogenetics in the molecular epidemiology and evolutionary studies of viral infections. 2036 3

The exponentially growing human population and the emergence of new diseases are clear indications that the world can no longer depend solely on conventional vaccine technologies and production schemes. The race to find a new vaccine technology is crucial to help speed up and complement the World Health Organization (WHO) disease elimination program. The ultimate goal is to uncover fast and efficient production schemes in the event of a pandemic, and also to effectively fight deadly diseases such as malaria, bird flu, hepatitis, and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Plasmid DNA vaccines, if properly formulated, offer specific priming of the immune system and similar or even better prophylactic effects than conventional vaccines. This article discusses many of the critical issues that need to be considered when developing fast, effective, and reliable plasmid DNA vaccine manufacturing processes. Different modes of plasmid production via bacterial fermentation are compared. Plasmid purification by chromatography is specifically discussed as it is the most commercially viable bioprocess engineering technique for continuous purification of supercoiled plasmid DNA. Current techniques and progress covering the area of plasmid DNA vaccine design, formulation, and delivery are also put forward.
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PMID:Mitigating the looming vaccine crisis: production and delivery of plasmid-based vaccines. 2087 32

The 13th Annual Meeting of the Japanese Society of Vaccinology convened the symposium on current status of veterinary vaccines on September 27, 2009 in Sapporo, Japan. A broad overview of veterinary vaccines from the past to the present and future as well as the latest developments such as Erysipelothrix rhusiopathiae and Mycoplasma hyopneumoniae for a platform vector for mucosa vaccine, inactivated avian influenza vaccine prepared from reassortant virus, and inactivated feline immunodeficiency virus (FIV) vaccine were presented.
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PMID:Symposium III report: Current status of veterinary vaccines. 2088 41


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