Home >> Tag Archives: Viruses/viral outbreaks/virology

Tag Archives: Viruses/viral outbreaks/virology

Transplant viral monitoring struggles and solutions

June 2021—Testing for viral infections post-transplant is an important part of care for transplant patients because of the risk for infections during immunosuppression. But viral load monitoring suffers from interlaboratory variability for several reasons, and while the problem is greater at higher viral loads, the interlaboratory variability is also present at lower viral loads. Steve Miller, MD, PhD, of the University of California San Francisco, and Joseph Yao, MD, of Mayo Clinic in Rochester, reported the monitoring difficulties, solutions, and new directions last fall in a CAP TODAY webinar made possible by a special educational grant from Roche.

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Unusual transplant-linked viral infections: ‘always be aware’

September 2015—Emerging and re-emerging viruses are well and alive, says Sherif Zaki, MD, PhD, chief of the Infectious Diseases Pathology Branch, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. At the Clinical Virology Symposium in April, he spoke on viral etiology in unexpected deaths, presenting a list of outbreaks of unexplained illnesses in which his branch took part in the past two decades and which turned out to be caused by viruses.

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For viral diagnosis, metagenomic NGS

June 2015—A 20-year-old woman who had returned to the U.S. after two months of hiking in Western Australia presented with three days of acute febrile illness—fever, rash, headache, nausea, and muscle and joint pain. Testing for common infectious causes of acute febrile illness, including Epstein-Barr virus, cytomegalovirus, and human immunodeficiency virus, all turned up negative. While the woman was in Australia, she had been warned about an ongoing outbreak of an exotic alphavirus, Ross River virus, in the region where she was hiking.

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Labs ramp up for Ebola patients, specimens

December 2014—Clinical laboratories have made impressive headway in their Ebola preparedness, though their plans are shaping up in different ways. That’s due, in part, to varying opinions about how to manage a dangerous and unpredictable virus. “We are really learning as we go along with this,” says D. Jane Hata, PhD, D(ABMM), director of microbiology and serology at Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Fla. For years there has been talk of the possibility of an airplane passenger bringing Ebola into the U.S., she says. “But we are on the ground now and we’re all actively planning to deal with this.”

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