A New Look At Common Cold
September 24, 2007
It used to be called the common cold. Now scientists are starting to put some not so common names to the hundreds of viruses that make people cough, sneeze, wheeze and worse. They described how new research techniques are uncovering a host of new respiratory viruses including a new monster-sized virus and spurring efforts to better understand the role of these viruses in disease.
“We have added a bunch of viruses, some of which we have never heard of before,” said Kenneth McIntosh of Harvard Medical School, speaking at a microbiology meeting in Chicago. “Many of these newly named viruses have been causing coughs and runny noses for hundreds of years along side better known as viruses such as rhinoviruses and adenoviruses. But scientists have only recently had the molecular research tools to identify these bugs. We know they are there but we don’t know what we really need to know about their capacity to produce disease.”
He continued saying “Information as cold viruses are the main culprit behind 50-80% of asthma attacks.” Dr. Jim Gern, of the University of Wisconsin School Of Medicine and Public Health said, “With the advent of new tests that are based on genetic material, we are finding there is a lot more out there that we are not able to detect before.” Some of the research activity was spurred by the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome or SARS which spread from China to 30 countries in 2003, infecting close to 8,000 people and killing nearly 800 before it was contained.
Another new virus is the human bocavirus, a close cousin to the bovine parvovirus and the canine minute virus which causes diarrhea in cattle and dogs. The other puzzling virus is the Mimi virus first discovered growing inside an amoeba in 1992 but which evaded identification until 2003 because of its enormous size and complex characteristics. Three times bigger than other viruses, the Mimi virus was found in the DNA of patients with pneumonia and may account for some of the 20-50% of pneumonia cases that previously went unidentified.Source Reuters
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