• Toru Takahashi, Ken Maeda, Tadaki Suzuki, Aki Ishido, Toru Shigeoka, Takayuki Tominaga, Toshiaki Kamei, Masahiro Honda, Daisuke Ninomiya, Takenori Sakai, Takanori Senba, Shozo Kaneyuki, Shota Sakaguchi, Akira Satoh, Takanori Hosokawa, Yojiro Kawabe, Shintaro Kurihara, Koichi Izumikawa, Shigeru Kohno, Taichi Azuma, Koichiro Suemori, Masaki Yasukawa, Tetsuya Mizutani, Tsutomu Omatsu, Yukie Katayama, Masaharu Miyahara, Masahito Ijuin, Kazuko Doi, Masaru Okuda, Kazunori Umeki, Tomoya Saito, Kazuko Fukushima, Kensuke Nakajima, Tomoki Yoshikawa, Hideki Tani, Shuetsu Fukushi, Aiko Fukuma, Momoko Ogata, Masayuki Shimojima, Noriko Nakajima, Noriyo Nagata, Harutaka Katano, Hitomi Fukumoto, Yuko Sato, Hideki Hasegawa, Takuya Yamagishi, Kazunori Oishi, Ichiro Kurane, Shigeru Morikawa, and Masayuki Saijo.
• Department of Hematology.
• J. Infect. Dis. 2014 Mar 1; 209 (6): 816-27.

BackgroundSevere fever with thrombocytopenia syndrome (SFTS) is caused by SFTS virus (SFTSV), a novel bunyavirus reported to be endemic in central and northeastern China. This article describes the first identified patient with SFTS and a retrospective study on SFTS in Japan.Methods Virologic and pathologic examinations were performed on the patient's samples. Laboratory diagnosis of SFTS was made by isolation/genome amplification and/or the detection of anti-SFTSV immunoglobulin G antibody in sera. Physicians were alerted to the initial diagnosis and asked whether they had previously treated patients with symptoms similar to those of SFTS.ResultsA female patient who died in 2012 received a diagnosis of SFTS. Ten additional patients with SFTS were then retrospectively identified. All patients were aged ≥50 years and lived in western Japan. Six cases were fatal. The ratio of males to females was 8:3. SFTSV was isolated from 8 patients. Phylogenetic analyses indicated that all of the Japanese SFTSV isolates formed a genotype independent to those from China. Most patients showed symptoms due to hemorrhage, possibly because of disseminated intravascular coagulation and/or hemophagocytosis.ConclusionsSFTS has been endemic to Japan, and SFTSV has been circulating naturally within the country.

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