Journal of clinical virology : the official publication of the Pan American Society for Clinical Virology
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Acute gastroenteritis caused by viruses is one of the leading causes of childhood morbidity. ⋯ Our finding showed the diversity of viral causative agents of gastroenteritis and the prevalence of each gastroenteritis-associated viral genotype in South Korea.
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Herpesviruses may cause substantial complications after lung transplantation. Especially their interaction with lung tissue cells may result in adverse effects for the transplant patients, and may lead to severe end organ disease or to chronic transplant rejection and to development of bronchiolitis obliterans (BOS). ⋯ In the following a short overview will be given about the different herpesviruses and their possible influence on the transplanted lung as well as about a method to determine the original virus load at the air surface of the lung. The quantitative data achieved by this method underline that some herpesviruses are often present at much higher levels at the air surface of the transplanted lung than in the blood, and that their influence on transplant survival may have been substantially underestimated so far.
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Comparative Study
Real-time PCR compared to Binax NOW and cytospin-immunofluorescence for detection of influenza in hospitalized patients.
Rapid tests have had a significant impact on influenza diagnosis, but more accurate tests are needed for hospitalized patients who test negative by rapid methods. ⋯ The accuracy of real-time RT-PCR should greatly improve the diagnosis of influenza in hospitals using simple rapid flu tests, but may have a more modest impact in hospitals with expertise in cytospin-DFA. Further studies are needed to determine the effect of influenza RT-PCR on patient management and costs in hospitalized patients.
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BK virus (BKV), which causes polyomavirus-associated nephropathy (PVN) in kidney transplant recipients (KTx), has 75% homology with JC virus (JCV), the etiologic agent of progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy (PML). The large T-antigen (T-ag) is the main regulatory protein of polyomaviruses that is expressed early in the viral cycle. ⋯ These data suggest that, as it is the case for the VP1 protein, the same population of CD8+ T-cells may recognize epitopes located on the BKV and JCV T protein. The overall cellular immune response against polyomavirus T-ag, however, is lower than against the VP1 protein and is more frequently detected in healthy individuals than in patients with active BKV or JCV infection.