A team of Welsh scientists have successfully cloned a human virus offering new hope for the treatment of potentially life-threatening diseases.
Human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) is a major infectious cause of congenital malformations worldwide. The vi…
A close relative of a common little-understood human virus that causes an estimated 23 million episodes of intestinal illness, 50,000 hospitalizations and 300 deaths each year has been discovered in mice. The finding by scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis is reported in the March 7 issue of the journal Science. Discovery of the new virus, known as murine norovirus 1 (MNV-1), may lead to a better understanding of its disease-causing cousins known as Norwalk viruses, or human noroviruses (HNVs). HNVs cause 90 percent of epidemic viral gastroenteritis worldwide, including those that sweep through cruise ships, nursing homes and military encampments causing debilitating diarrhea and vomiting.
An association between a common human virus and colon cancer has been established by a group of researchers in the U.S., suggesting a possible role for it in the development of cancer in the human intestinal tract. The so-called JC virus most likely infects humans through the upper respiratory tract and remains in a latent stage in most people throughout their lives, and, in some cases, causes minor sub-clinical problems. But in people whose immune systems are depressed, either through chemotherapy given to organ transplant recipients or an illness such as AIDS, JCV can become active and may contribute to cancer in the brain or cause the fatal demyelinating disease Progressive Multifocal Leukoencephalopathy (PML).