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Science

Killer Virus 'From Paramyxoviridae Family' 45

Posted by timothy from the bad-family dept.
texchanchan writes "Yahoo story about the microbe that's been killing world travelers being isolated and identified as a 'paramyxoviridae' virus (not a bacterium. Simple page on the difference.) Here are pictures of similar viruses (Rinderpest, ugh! sounds as bad as anthrax) from the Big Picture Book of Viruses."
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Killer Virus 'From Paramyxoviridae Family' More

Killer Virus 'From Paramyxoviridae Family'

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  • Cure? (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I wonder how soon doctors will be able to release a service pack for this virus?
    • Cue the
      apt-get antidote

      trolls...

    • Re:Cure? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Simon Field ( 563434 ) on Wednesday March 19, 2003 @02:15AM (#5542354) Homepage


      It is related to Canine Distemper Virus, and the Newcastle Virus famous for infecting chickens.

      The "service pack" for Newcastle is usually total destruction of all the birds in the area near the infection. Probably because vaccinations cost more than chickens do.

      It would be interesting to see if innoculating people with one of these (or Parainfluenza Virus) would act as a vaccine, like using cowpox virus to prevent smallpox.

      The Phocine Distemper virus that is killing seals is also related. Does Canine Distemper vaccine work to protect seals from Phocine?

      • The "service pack" for Newcastle is usually total destruction of all the birds in the area near the infection. Probably because vaccinations cost more than chickens do.

        No seriously, is the virus dangerous if the birds are cooked or do they need to be incinerated?

  • Hmm... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by smoondog ( 85133 ) on Tuesday March 18, 2003 @11:07PM (#5541623)
    Well, I think that, assuming most of the reports are true, the world may be able to breathe a collective (but cautious) sigh of relief. (knock on wood) It isn't influenza. This is good. It doesn't spread through the air/casual contact. This, too, is good. I know for a fact (through collaborators) that the CDC is really, really focused on this right now. Finally, WHO is suggesting that this won't be a global pandemic. This is very good. It also seems that, according to the news, a few people are recovering. I'm really, really impressed at how focused the international health community can be, even when separated by political boundaries and vast geographical boundaries. Lets hope they keep up the pressure to keep this contained.

    Could you imagine an influenza strain that spreads through the air and causes chronic lung damage (and lots of deaths)? That would be devastating.

    Anyway, here is the ultimate of Karma whoring: The Google News link for the story [google.com]

    -Sean

    • Re:Hmm... (Score:3, Funny)

      by arvindn ( 542080 )
      the world may be able to breathe a collective (but cautious) sigh of relief ... It doesn't spread through the air

      You mean, since it doesn't spread through the air its OK to breathe now? ;)

    • Re:Hmm... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by istartedi ( 132515 ) on Wednesday March 19, 2003 @12:20AM (#5541945) Journal

      Could you imagine an influenza strain that spreads through the air and causes chronic lung damage (and lots of deaths)? That would be devastating.

      That doesn't scare me as much as the possibility of an airborne virus with long latency and high mortality. Imagine what it would be like if AIDS were airborne. Bugs like Ebola aren't actually that frightening on a global scale because as soon a a handful of people get it they immediately quarantine everybody who has contact. Ebola seldom spreads beyond the African villages where it breeds simply because it's so virulent. No, the really devestating viruses are the ones that bide their time.

      • Very true. People often forget that what is so bad about HIV/AIDS, is it's slow, quiet, and lethal. Good thing is hard to spread.

        I've always been amazed at the number of viruses we catch and never even notice. Each one tinkers with your DNA. Some everyone catches. Some increase your cancer risk. Most we know nothing about.

    • Re:Hmm... (Score:5, Informative)

      by constantnormal ( 512494 ) on Wednesday March 19, 2003 @01:02AM (#5542107)
      Could you imagine an influenza strain that spreads through the air and causes chronic lung damage (and lots of deaths)?

      We don't have to imagine it -- it's already happened. Check out the Influenza Pandemic of 1918 [stanford.edu].

      One quote from the link:
      "The effect of the influenza epidemic was so severe that the average life span in the US was depressed by 10 years."
    • Given the relatively low number of cases in a congested city like Hong Kong, the initial reports of how easy it could spread seemed questionable. I mean if it spreads as easy as the flu, has been around for a couple of weeks, but there are only a hundred or so cases. Well, it doesn't quite sound like a pandemnic. More like the media was oversensationalizing things again.

      • Re:Hmm... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by EverLurking ( 595528 ) <<slash> <at> <davechen.org>> on Wednesday March 19, 2003 @04:51AM (#5542759) Homepage
        Yup, likey another case of the Media generating mass hysteria to sell air-time. But SARS does seem a bit deadlier than your average Pneumonia upon superficial analysis.

        The total cases of SARS as reported by the World Health Organization [who.int] is 219 cases with 4 deaths. Doing some rather inexact extrapolation that works out to about 1800 deaths per 100,000. Bear in mind, these numbers have very small and inexact "n" values in the denominator and probably can't be directly extrapolated to this high an incidence (per 100,000).

        Who knows how many people had milder forms of this viral infection and didn't need to seek medical attention or recovered on their own, or how many others were now calssified as having SARS. I'm afraid that's the problem with these statistics: It's hard to derive a truly accurate denominator.

        To give you some perspective, the plain old pneumonia/influenzena deaths as tallied up by the CDC worked out to about 10-12 per 100,000.

        We'll see as the number of SARS cases continue to come in what a more accurate Mortality rate works out to being. I really doubt that this condition is 180 times more deadly than your typical pneumonia. But the media is sure treating it like that in it's daily search for sensationalism.

        DaveC

        • I really doubt that this condition is 180 times more deadly than your typical pneumonia. But the media is sure treating it like that in it's daily search for sensationalism.

          Agreed! The small value of n coupled with the novelty of the disease will tend to make the numbers look worse than they are. Given the fairly nondescript symptoms it is entirely possible that there have been tens of thousands of monor cases that were written off as the flu without even a doctor visit. Only the most severe cases are l

          • You bring up a great point, that with rare diseases/conditions, it is often impossible to know exactly how prevalant such a condition is. It becomes very difficult to tell if it is a condition that kills 1 in 100,000 or if it kills 0.0001 in 100,000 if you just have a handfull of recognized cases and no idea of what the denominator is especially if the sub-acute (ie. less serious) manifestations of this condition are so benign as to be indistinguishable from the common cold or a mild upper respiratory cond
          • You bring up a great point, that with rare diseases/conditions, it is often impossible to know exactly how prevalant such a condition is. It becomes very difficult to tell if it is a condition that kills 1 in 100,000 or if it kills 0.0001 in 100,000 if you just have a handfull of recognized cases and no idea of what the denominator is especially if the sub-acute (ie. less serious) manifestations of this condition are so benign as to be indistinguishable from the common cold or a mild upper respiratory cond

    • Re:Hmm... (Score:2, Informative)

      by knowledgepeacewi ( 523787 )
      >>I'm really, really impressed at how focused the international health community can be, even when separated by political boundaries and vast geographical boundaries. Lets hope they keep up the pressure to keep this contained.
      You know, I'm really really unimpressed seeing that no one cared for months until a few americans started getting sick.
      Try not to decieve yourself. The international health community still only gives a **** if it affects the people giving them the most money.

      • Re:Hmm... (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Oddly_Drac ( 625066 )
        "You know, I'm really really unimpressed seeing that no one cared for months until a few americans started getting sick."

        Well, don't mistake media interest for total interest, otherwise you won't get your virus warnings until close to the trigger date, and you'll believe the entire output of CNN.

        "The international health community still only gives a **** if it affects the people giving them the most money."

        Which explains the massive effort into killing smallpox and polio back in the day when it was as

  • My manager the virus (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 18, 2003 @11:10PM (#5541637)

    My manager is like a virus. He'll keep injecting his own code into a perfectly good working application someone else made until the thing bursts, and then he'll move on the the next application.

    • That's nothing, my manager will make *me* inject *his* coding ideas (code necrotic agent) into a perfectly good working application, making it slowly decay into a slushy mess or barely readable code that I have to work on everyday as a trauma patient whose vitals will never stabilize. By the time I'm completely fed up, I have to practically rewrite the damn thing, just so that he can sinisterly make me administer new doses of necrotic agent all over again.

  • Thank Deus! (Score:4, Funny)

    by arvindn ( 542080 ) on Wednesday March 19, 2003 @12:00AM (#5541870) Homepage Journal
    being isolated and identified as a paramyxoviridae virus

    What a relief! You won't believe how much sleep I've been losing thinking it could be a pseudopicornaviridae!

  • Is it possible to vaccinate for this? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by windows ( 452268 ) on Wednesday March 19, 2003 @12:43AM (#5542037)
    It's my understanding that this same family of viruses is responsible for measles and mumps in humans and distemper in dogs. For a little information about this virus, check here [le.ac.uk]. All of those have vaccines for them. So would it be possible to prepare a vaccine for this virus, too?
    • All of those have vaccines for them. So would it be possible to prepare a vaccine for this virus, too?

      Probably... if you're willing to wait 3 or 4 months. Even without the usual extensive testing, producing vaccines against new viruses is very time consuming.

  • not really surprising (Score:4, Informative)

    by g4dget ( 579145 ) on Wednesday March 19, 2003 @01:02AM (#5542104)
    This is not particularly surprising: viruses in that family cause a lot of "common colds" and other URIs (among them, parainfluenza is in that family). See here [merck.com] and here [cdc.gov].

  • SuperVirus!!! (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by DrLudicrous ( 607375 )
    Man, can anyone say superbug from The Stand?

    Whatever you do, stay away from guys with the initials RF.

  • Some more info on paramyxoviruses (Score:5, Informative)

    by reverseengineer ( 580922 ) on Wednesday March 19, 2003 @02:26AM (#5542391)
    This family of viruses (paramyxoviruses) are very closely related to influenza viruses- in fact, influenzas belong to the family orthomyxoviridae. Myxo, by the way, comes from the Greek for "mucus"- appropriate given their tendency to cause respiratory tract infections.

    Both families are single-stranded "antisense" RNA viruses- the RNA strand is complementary to a coding, or "sense" strand of mRNA that it acts as a template for. It should be noted that while these are RNA viruses, they are not retroviruses, as some other posters have suggested- no reverse transcriptase, no DNA stage- instead of hijacking the cell's transcription machinery like HIV, myxoviruses are slightly more considerate guests- they come packing their own RNA polymerase proteins. The RNA polymerase makes a gigantic number of of sense mRNA from the antisense strand. Once these get made, the virus stops being a considerate guest in the cell- the mRNAs head over to the ribosomes in the cell and get translated into proteins just as if the cell's genome had produced them. These are of course viral proteins however- new capsids (protein envelopes), new polymerases, new glycoproteins. This is the part where it really starts to suck for the cell- the original viral antisense mRNA gets replicated many times, and then gets packed into the newly made viral particles. The viruses then lyse (kill) their host cell and then spread out an move on to a new cell. This takes about 20-30 minutes from fusion with the cell to lysis usually.

    Both ortho- and para- myxovirus families respond to a characteristic test called hemagglutination, which is pretty much what it sounds like- a glycoprotein on the surface of the virus causes red blood cells to clump together. The major difference between the orthomyxoviridae and paramyxoviridae families is simply a matter of genome arrangement- ortho viruses like the influenzas have their genomes cut into several different smaller segments inside the virus, while the para viruses like measles, rinderpest, and our mystery illness have a single segment.

    It should be stressed that genome comparisons are of limited help at the level of families- all the single-stranded antisense RNA viruses have pretty much the same structure, but they code for quite different glycoproteins (these are sugar-protein hybrid molecules on the surface of the virus). Glycoproteins are both the source of host recognition- they bind to specific receptors on a cell (these receptors are often, but not always, unique to the cells of a species)- and the agent that kills the cell. In the paramyxoviruses, remarkably these two functions (fusion and lysis) are carried out by two linked subunits on the same glycoprotein.

    The variety of glycoproteins these RNA viruses have produced have made them incredibly diverse- they infect plants, animals, humans, they cause all manner of symptoms. The paramyxoviruses, for example, have members which result in mumps and measles, and then others that cause pneumonia. A closely related family (also ss antisense RNA) are the rhabdoviruses, some of which infect plants, and one of which causes rabies. Another antisense ssRNA family are the filoviruses, which tend to have rather toxic glycoproteins- members include Marburg and Ebola.

    While it is a relief that the virus causing this deadly outbreak of pneumonia has been isolated, and catalogued in relation to other viruses, it should be noted that finding this relation may be of little use, given the nearly infinite variety displayed by even its closest relatives.

  • That pesky Paramyxoviridae family (Score:4, Funny)

    by IainHere ( 536270 ) on Wednesday March 19, 2003 @03:39AM (#5542607)
    Killer Virus 'From Paramyxoviridae Family'

    I always said that family caused nothin' but trouble.

  • New news (Score:4, Informative)

    by gene_tailor ( 601527 ) on Wednesday March 19, 2003 @10:28PM (#5549544) Journal
    The media is now reporting that most of the cases from Hong Kong all seem to have been exposed at a particular hotel floor... Here's a link [iht.com] to the story.
    • Further backtracking traces "more than 90 percent of Hong Kong's infections to a single visitor from neighboring Guangdong Province" [in China], see article at Int'l Herald Tribune [iht.com]. The article notes that details on what's happening in China (total # of cases etc) are not readily available and it will be hard to learn more about the history of the outbreak's development without such information.

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