- Joined
- Jul 19, 2004
- Messages
- 29,622
- Location
- Out of Bounds
In case you're unimpressed with COVID-19 as a major health crisis, there's a newly emerging health horror that might grab your interest - the Chapare virus.
This is a viral hemorrhagic fever similar to Ebola. After a teaser debut involving a single patient in 2004, it disappeared. In 2019 it infected 5 people, of whom 3 died.
Analysis of the latest outbreak demonstrates the Chapare virus is now capable of being transmitted among humans.
FULL STORY:
https://www.livescience.com/chapare-virus-human-transmission.htm
This is a viral hemorrhagic fever similar to Ebola. After a teaser debut involving a single patient in 2004, it disappeared. In 2019 it infected 5 people, of whom 3 died.
Analysis of the latest outbreak demonstrates the Chapare virus is now capable of being transmitted among humans.
Deadly hemorrhagic fever in Bolivia can spread between people
The hemorrhagic fever had only appeared in one patient before 2019.
A deadly animal virus that causes fevers, abdominal pain, vomiting, bleeding gums, skin rash and pain behind the eyes can now spread between people, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced Monday (Nov. 16).
Until now, there had been only one confirmed case of Chapare virus, an Ebola-like illness that turned up in the rural Bolivian province of Chapare in 2004 and then disappeared. But in 2019, at least five more people caught the bug, according to research now made public. The virus spread from person to person through bodily fluids in a region near Bolivia's capital city of La Paz, killing three people. There are no active outbreaks of Chapare in 2020, and even in the event of further outbreaks the virus would be unlikely to cause a pandemic, according to virus experts.
There are reasons to be concerned about the news, however. Three of the five confirmed patients from the 2019 outbreak were health care workers, according to a CDC statement; a "young medical resident," an ambulance medic and a gastroenterologist all contracted Chapare after contact with bodily fluids from infected patients. Two of them died.
Hemorrhagic fevers such as Ebola rarely spread as widely as respiratory illnesses like the flu or COVID-19, Colin Carlson, a Georgetown University researcher who studies zoonotic diseases, told Live Science. That's because hemorrhagic fever symptoms typically appear soon after infections (as opposed to the long incubation periods of respiratory illnesses), and direct contact with bodily fluids is generally necessary to catch a hemorrhagic disease. But outbreaks can devastate health care systems, with huge numbers of health care workers becoming sick after treating infected patients. ...
Scientists and the public tend to think of deadly hemorrhagic diseases as African or South Asian, Carlson said. But Chapare's case shows they can turn up anywhere in the world. ...
"The reality is hemorrhagic viruses are everywhere, the species that carry them are everywhere, and we haven't had a really big run in like this here," he said. "This makes you sit up and say 'Oh, this is usually the sort of thing we get 10 years before something bigger along these lines.'"
That 10 year figure is a rough approximation. But viruses that eventually become major infectious diseases tend to make a few forays into human populations over the course of decades before really catching on. ...
FULL STORY:
https://www.livescience.com/chapare-virus-human-transmission.htm
Last edited: