A global network of researchers has found a new virus—related to the virus that causes rabies—that may be responsible for three cases of acute hemorrhagic fever in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) during 2009, according to a study in PLOS Pathogens released last week (September 27).
In the summer of 2009, two patients—teenagers from the Mangala village in the southwest corner of DRC—exhibited unexplained symptoms of hemorrhagic fever, including vomiting blood, fever, and bleeding from mucus membranes, and died after 3 days. When a third patient fell ill—the nurse who cared for them—medical experts transferred him to the regional hospital where he recovered, and sent his blood samples to a series of research labs for analysis.
Though researchers weren’t able to isolate the novel rhabdovirus—dubbed for the province where Mangala is located—they were able to sequence nearly 100 percent of its genome using a technique called deep sequencing. ...
