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Killer virus strikes in US
http://www.sina.com.cn 2003/06/09 11:31  Shanghai Daily

  A virus related to smallpox that has never been detected before in the Western Hemisphere may be the cause of a mysterious disease spreading from pet prairie dogs to people across the upper Midwest of America, US health officials have said.

  Doctor James Hughes, director of the National Center for Infectious Diseases of the United States said on Saturday that asgroupsof prairie dogs - actually rodents and not dogs - sold from a suburban Chicago pet distributor appears to be infected with the monkeypox virus, a member of the same viral family that causes smallpox but is not nearly as deadly.

  Monkeypox has typically been found in West African rain forests, Hughes said. The death rate among infected humans has ranged from 1 percent to 10 percent.

  Hughes said although monkeypox is spread primarily through rodents in Africa, scientists haven't ruled out person-to-person transmission.

  "We're in the very early stages of classifying this virus," Hughes said. "We're not certain."

  Since early May, 17 possible cases have been reported in the US state of Wisconsin in people as young as 4 and as old as 48. One possible case has been reported in Illinois and one has been reported in Indiana, health officials from all three US states said.

  They appeared to have been exposed to prairie dogs whose popularity as pets has grown in recent years. They reported fever, coughs, rashes and swollen lymph nodes.

  US health officials are still researching the disease with samples from the infected prairie dogs and humans, but the virus appears susceptible to the anti-viral drug Cidofovir, Hughes said. He isn't aware of any long-term after-effects of monkeypox.

  Four people in the US state of Wisconsin have had to be hospitalized.




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