Scientists have identified a possible culprit in the mysterious syndrome that has killed dozens of children in Cambodia since April, the Cambodian Ministry of Health and the World Health Organization announced on 8 July...
... They found strains of Streptococcus in throat samples
from a number of patients but eliminated it as the cause of death after finding
the same strains in samples from children with other symptoms.
Neighboring Vietnam has been badly hit by hand, foot, and mouth disease, so
"we were expecting an outbreak sooner or later," Buchy says. But samples
from victims did not initially test positive for Enterovirus 71. It was only
after contacting scientists at the Oxford University Clinical Research Unit in
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, that the Pasteur team learned that the primers and
probes they had designed for the virus in 2009 were out of date. Sequences of
more recent Enterovirus 71 strains from Vietnam revealed that the virus had
undergone significant genetic drift, Buchy says.
If Enterovirus 71 is indeed the culprit, one puzzling aspect may be the high
number of fatal cases in a country of only 15 million people. Vietnam,
which has a population roughly six times as large, confirmed only 20 deaths from hand, foot, and mouth
disease between January and April of this
year. In China, meanwhile, the health ministry announced last week that
240 people died of hand, foot, and mouth disease
between January and May 2012. (The death toll has been higher this year
than in years past, a ministry official told China Daily.)
While health officials have no idea how many people might be infected with
hand, foot, and mouth disease in Cambodia, Buchy speculates that the population
is largely naive to the virus and that "we may have a huge proportion of the
child population that is not totally immune." Institut Pasteur scientists are
now testing additional samples from the 24 patients and waiting for cell culture
results. They will then start sequencing the Cambodian strain, Buchy
says. Eventually, he says, they hope to determine "for how long and at which
level the virus has been circulating" in Cambodia.http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2012/07/cambodian-killer-unmasked.html?rss=1
