Talk:Lassa fever

Prevention and the Canadian National Microbiology Laboratory vs. USAMRIID

I have checked into what the National Lab in Winnipeg has published after an individual placed NML in the place of USAMRIID for the Vaccine research. I had originally included two reference to USAMRIID's work which had never been removed.

• Geisbert TW, Jones S, Fritz EA, Jahrling P, et al. 2005 Development of a new vaccine for the prevention of lassa fever. PLOS MEDICINE 2 (6): 537-545 JUN 2005.

• Preston, Richard. 2002 The Demon In The Freezer. Random House, Inc.

The second reference is a non-fiction book about smallpox, but it does give background about Peter Jahrling, a co-authour of the above article (reference).

I checked to be sure that the NML had not published anything on Lassa Vaccines. I was right. Here is a PDF listing of some of their selected publications: [1]

There are some interesting related topic however, worth looking into for those that are interested. I include them here:

• Bastien,N., Trudel,M., and Simard,C. (1999) Complete protection of mice from respiratory syncytial virus infection following mucosal delivery of synthetic peptide vaccines Vaccine 17: 832-836. PubMed
• Kang,C.Y., Luo,L., Wainberg,M.A., and Li,Y. (1999) Development of HIV/AIDS vaccine using chimeric gag-env virus-like particles Biol.Chem. 380: 353-364. PubMed
• Weingartl,H., Czub,M., Czub,S., Neufeld,J., Marszal,P., Gren,J., Smith,G., Jones,S., Proulx,R., Deschambault,Y., Grudeski,E., Andonov,A., He,R., Li,Y., Copps,J., Grolla,A., Dick,D., Berry,J., Ganske,S., Manning,L., and Cao,J. (2004) Immunization with modified vaccinia virus Ankarabased recombinant vaccine against severe acute respiratory syndrome is associated with enhanced hepatitis in ferrets J.Virol. 78: 12672-12676. PubMed

Spread to UK, US, etc...

Can someone find a reference to back this up? I don't think this has happened at all yet, and will remove this paragraph unless someone points me to some literature... Thanks.

         http://www.vrtnieuws.net/nieuwsnet_master/versie2/nieuws/details/060722Lassagriep/index.shtml
         It's in Dutch, but basically is about a recent case of Lassa Fever in Frankfurt.

== Hey there,

I was reading The Deamon in the freezer, then looked up some stuff on smallpox, came across lassa stuff on the way. I do believe that there is Lassa vaccine developed by USAMRIID.

Comparison to Ebola

I removed this:

Lassa fever is far more deadly than Ebola, though they share similar symptoms. Because Lassa is a very fast replicating and debilitating virus, the chances of a worldwide epidemic are small. Patients are far too weak to board a plane and spread it to other parts of the world.

It seems to be in contradiction of the listed mortality rates for Lassa and Ebola. Further, "Patients are far too weak to board a plane" doesn't make any sense. The virus (according to the article) has an incubation period of up to 21 days, a mortality rate of 1%, and is inaparent in 80% of cases. Finally, it's conjectural and missing a citation. icambron 04:17, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

Medical Aspects: Prevention

I removed the line "Because this virus is so contagious, it has been classified as an NIAID Biodefense Category A Agent." from this section because the corresponding link (http://www.niaid.nih.gov/topics/biodefenserelated/biodefense/documents/cata_overview.pdf) does not support the claim and in fact only contains one passing reference to Lassa regarding differentiating it from other viruses.