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Hemorrhagic fever in Xi'an in China?

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KiwiMum View Drop Down
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    Posted: December 26 2021 at 4:45pm

Here's something that's just flashed up in my newsfeed. If it's true, it's very worrying. It's a short video reporting that the city of Xi'an in China has had an outbreak of hemorrhagic fever and so has locked down all 13 million inhabitants. 

Sorry I can't post link because since it flashed up, the video has been removed from YouTube. It was by The Frustrated Indian (TFIglobal) if you can find it on another platform.

Those who got it wrong, for whatever reason, may feel defensive and retrench into a position that doesn’t accord with the facts.
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote Dutch Josh Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: December 27 2021 at 12:29am

[url]https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/surge-12232021120335.html[/url] or https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/surge-12232021120335.html ;

However, the city has also seen a growing number of hemorrhagic fever cases in recent weeks, according to media controlled by the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

The Global Times, which has close ties to CCP mouthpiece the People's Daily, quoted a medical staff member at the infection unit of the First Affiliated Hospital of Xi'an Jiaotong University as saying that the hospital had admitted a patient with non-life-threatening hemorrhagic fever in the past few days.

"Hemorrhagic fever is a common infectious disease in northern China," the paper said. "Starting from October every year, some areas of Shaanxi [of which Xi'an is the provincial capital] enter the high incidence season of hemorrhagic fever."

The disease, also known as epidemic hemorrhagic fever, is caused by hantavirus, with rodents as the main source of infection, it said.

Wang said some restrictions were already in place ahead of Thursday's lockdown, as China pursues a zero-COVID strategy ahead of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing.

"What I'm really worried about this time around is that we don't know how long this lockdown will go on for; there's the question of getting hold of supplies," she said. "Even if we can get them, the prices will go up."

and [url]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndrome_coronavirus_2#Genome[/url] or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndrome_coronavirus_2#GenomeSARS-CoV-2 has a linear, positive-sense, single-stranded RNA genome about 30,000 bases long.[103] 

DJ Both CoVid-19 and the hanta virus [url]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthohantavirus#Genome[/url] or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthohantavirus#Genome ; The genome of hantaviruses is negative-sense, single-stranded RNA.

are single-stranded RNA virusses (negative/positive related to the way they "turn"? ) [url]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sense_(molecular_biology)#RNA_sense_in_viruses[/url] or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sense_(molecular_biology)#RNA_sense_in_viruses ; 

RNA sense in viruses[edit]

In virology, the term "sense" has a slightly different meaning. The genome of an RNA virus can be said to be either positive-sense, also known as a "plus-strand", or negative-sense, also known as a "minus-strand". In most cases, the terms "sense" and "strand" are used interchangeably, making terms such as "positive-strand" equivalent to "positive-sense", and "plus-strand" equivalent to "plus-sense". Whether a viral genome is positive-sense or negative-sense can be used as a basis for classifying viruses.

Positive-sense[edit]

Positive-sense (5′-to-3′) viral RNA signifies that a particular viral RNA sequence may be directly translated into viral proteins (e.g., those needed for viral replication). Therefore, in positive-sense RNA viruses, the viral RNA genome can be considered viral mRNA, and can be immediately translated by the host cell. Unlike negative-sense RNA, positive-sense RNA is of the same sense as mRNA. Some viruses (e.g. Coronaviridae) have positive-sense genomes that can act as mRNA and be used directly to synthesize proteins without the help of a complementary RNA intermediate. Because of this, these viruses do not need to have an RNA polymerase packaged into the virion—the RNA polymerase will be one of the first proteins produced by the host cell, since it is needed in order for the virus's genome to be replicated.

Negative-sense[edit]

Negative-sense (3′-to-5′) viral RNA is complementary to the viral mRNA, thus a positive-sense RNA must be produced by an RNA-dependent RNA polymerase from it prior to translation. Like DNA, negative-sense RNA has a nucleotide sequence complementary to the mRNA that it encodes; also like DNA, this RNA cannot be translated into protein directly. Instead, it must first be transcribed into a positive-sense RNA that acts as an mRNA. Some viruses (e.g. influenza viruses) have negative-sense genomes and so must carry an RNA polymerase inside the virion.

DJ Can hanta-RNA recombine in any way with CoViD ? [url]https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1183691.shtml[/url] or https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1183691.shtml (Chinese state media march 2020); Unlike COVID-19, hantavirus is not mainly transmitted through the respiratory system, but a patient's excreta and blood can be contagious, virologists said, after a Chinese worker died of the hantavirus on Monday. 

News of the death from hantavirus amid the COVID-19 pandemic sparked widespread concern among netizens, with many worried that it would transmit between humans and become a double blow for humankind while the COVID-19 pandemic has yet to end. 

The worker, surnamed Tian, planned to go back to Shandong to work along with 29 other people on a chartered bus on Monday, but began to feel unwell on the way and was sent to hospital in Ningshan county, Shannxi Province. Tian died despite treatment on Monday morning. 

All the other passengers tested negative for the novel coronavirus and their test results for hantavirus are pending, Ningshan county government said on Wednesday. 

It is unlikely that the patient infected his fellow passengers, even though they sat on the same bus, as infection does not usually occur between people. People are also not normally attacked by hantavirus and COVID-19 at the same time, Yang Zhanqiu, a virologist at Wuhan University, told the Global Times on Wednesday. 

"Unlike the COVID-19, the hantavirus in most cases does not transmit through the respiratory system. But the human excreta and blood of an infected patient can transmit the virus to humans," Yang said. 

Hantavirus, also known as epidemic hemorrhagic fever, or renal syndrome hemorrhagic fever, is an acute viral infectious disease mainly characterized by fever, tendency to bleed, and kidney damage. 

The disease may be caused by contact with rats, eating food that they have touched, or breathing air contaminated by mouse feces. The disease is prevalent in villages from May to June and October to December, Yang said.

"There is no need to worry about the hantavirus. Hantavirus disease is preventable and controllable and there are vaccines to prevent it. Its incidence in urban cities is very low as the disease is mainly found in rural villages where rats tend to appear when people are working in the field," Yang explained. 

The disease is prevalent in Eurasia, with cases of infection in Russia, Finland, Sweden, and China. The death rate from hantavirus infection in China stands between 1 percent and 10 percent while the death rate in the US is much higher, with an average of 40 percent, according to Yang. 

Similar to COVID-19, the hantavirus can severely damage patients' liver, kidney and other organ functions and produce symptoms of fever and massive bleeding, Yang told the Global Times. 

 After the worker died of hantavirus, experts in Southwest China's Yunnan Province launched an epidemiological investigation. In the last five years, Southwest China's Yunnan Province has reported 1,231 patients with hantavirus. More than 200 cases are reported in Yunnan each year, news site thepaper.cn reported. 

DJ So hanta virus is spreading in a different way...I think however since CoViD and Hanta are related to rodents (as is Omicron) "rats, cats, pets" could be a factor to keep an eye on. A sort of mixing in non-human hosts may be more likely then seeing that in human hosts. Hanta-infection (in humans) most likely will be symptomatic-and thus be picked up. They most likely will check extra to see if the increase of Delta-CoViD AND Hanta in Xi'an may bring "unwelcome mixing"...

[url]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthohantavirus#Vaccine[/url] or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthohantavirus#Vaccine ; As of 2021, no vaccines against hantaviruses have been approved by the U.S. FDA, but whole virus inactivated bivalent vaccines against Hantaan virus and Seoul virus are available in China and South Korea.

 In both countries, the use of the vaccine, combined with other preventive measures, has significantly reduced the incidence of hantavirus infections. Apart from these vaccines, 

four types of vaccines have been researched: 

DNA vaccines targeting the M genome segment and the S genome segment, 

subunit vaccines that use recombinant Gn, Gc, and N proteins of the virus, 

virus vector vaccines that have recombinant hantavirus proteins inserted in them, 

and 

virus-like particle vaccines that contain viral proteins, but lack genetic material. Of these, only DNA vaccines have entered into clinical trials.[39][40]

DJ So there are "tools"...

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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote KiwiMum Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: December 27 2021 at 12:37am

Thanks Josh, excellent info.

Those who got it wrong, for whatever reason, may feel defensive and retrench into a position that doesn’t accord with the facts.
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote Dutch Josh Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: December 27 2021 at 2:30am

DJ China is dealing with the Xi'an hantavirus by killing the rodents...people/pets supposed to stay inside, laundry etc. also indoors-outdoors chemical cleaning supposed to kill all rodents spreading the hantavirus...(wich will be a big job...they most likely will have to make several rounds, trying to deny food/water to rodents in hiding).

KiwiMum, you are very welcome-thanks for starting another chapter of this pandemic...recombinations...[url]https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/plenty-of-evidence-for-recombination-in-sars-cov-2-69156[/url] or https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/plenty-of-evidence-for-recombination-in-sars-cov-2-69156

Different variants of the virus behind the COVID-19 pandemic are swapping chunks of genetic material, but it’s not yet clear what implications that may have for public health.

-

Early on in the pandemic, research suggested recombination likely played a pivotal role in SARS-CoV-2’s emergence as a human pathogen. In a study published in July 2020, for instance, Bette Korber, a researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and colleagues reported that a portion of the receptor binding domain of SARS-CoV-2’s spike protein—the part of the spike that directly interacts with the ACE2 receptor that the virus uses to gain entry into cells—came from recombination with pangolin coronaviruses.


It’s no surprise, then, that the virus continued to recombine after it began infecting people. “It should be happening because it’s a very important evolutionary mechanism for these viruses,” explains Korber. At the same time, she adds, “quantifying how much it’s there can be tricky because . . . it’s computationally not easy to look at vast data sets,” and the search can be confounded by genetic changes that can come about in the lab.

DJ I would describe recombination as a "mega mutation". To show how it works a try to explain it;

Say this is virus A; AterribleCoronavirusnotinaminoacidsbutasletters

A mutation could see AterrableCoronavirusnotinaminoacidbutasletters....mutation at position 6 i to a (so i6a mutation) a total of 46 positions, SARS-2 has 29,200 or so (If I remember correctly) 

Some mutations are deletions, in this example a letter is not being reproduced...

Now recombination of AterrableCoronavirusnotinaminoacidbutasletters with HantaVirus could see AterrableCoronavirusnotinaminoacidHanta So 

not just small segments but major parts of the virus forming a new combination. Sequencing should be able to find these mutations. 

The computational methods used to identify recombinant events rely on comparisons of different sections of genetic material. The bigger the differences between one strain and another, the easier recombination is for algorithms to pick out. But “in the first months of the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak, most of the viruses were quite similar to each other,” Boni tells The Scientist. “Even by summer 2020, there wasn’t enough diversity to say anything meaningful about whether the viruses were swapping genes.”


Most researchers assumed that SARS-CoV-2 viruses were mixing and matching bits of their genomes because recombination is common in coronaviruses. It wasn’t until about a year into the pandemic that there was enough variation to confirm that hypothesis, says Ben Jackson, a postdoc in Andrew Rambaut’s group at the University of Edinburgh.

DJ The difference between (major) mutations and (minor) recombinations may be a matter of definition. 

The authors analyzed viral sequencing data and, out of about 279,000 SARS-CoV-2 genomes collected, 16 showed evidence of recombination—mostly between the B.1.1.7 (Alpha) and B.1.177 variants—based on the mosaicism of their genomes.


Work is also underway to detect recombination on a larger scale and in real time. In a preprint released on bioRxiv on August 5, Russell Corbett-Detig, who focuses on genomic epidemiology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and colleagues describe a new phylogenetic tool, Recombination Inference using Phylogenetic PLacEmentS (RIPPLES). 

Using RIPPLES, the researchers identified 606 recombination events among a continuously updated phylogenetic tree with 1.6 million SARS-CoV-2 genome entries. “Approximately 2.7% of sequenced SARS-CoV-2 genomes have recombinant ancestry,” Corbett-Detig and colleagues write in the preprint. They also determined that recombination appears to be concentrated in the region of the Spike protein.

DJ With increase of spread most likely not only mutations but also rcombinations increase. One big concern is that recombination might generate a “super variant” that’s markedly more infectious or more deadly than previous versions—or both. “When you have multiple lineages circulating, the danger is that the viruses could combine one dangerous phenotype with another dangerous phenotype into a single virus that has two dangerous phenotypes,” says Boni.

DJ There is discussion on if recombinations are that much worse then mutations...both most often weaken the virus. 

[url]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SARS-CoV-2_Omicron_variant#Mutations[/url] or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SARS-CoV-2_Omicron_variant#Mutations ; The variant has many mutations, some of which have concerned scientists.[24] The Omicron variant has a total of 60 mutations compared to the original Wuhan variant: 50 nonsynonymous mutations, 8 synonymous mutations, and 2 non-coding mutations.[5] Thirty-two mutations affect the spike protein, the main antigenic target of antibodies generated by infections and of many vaccines widely administered. Many of those mutations had not been observed in other strains.[25][26]

[url]https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.14.472632v1[/url] or https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.14.472632v1The molecular spectrum (i.e., the relative frequency of the twelve types of base substitutions) of mutations acquired by the progenitor of Omicron was significantly different from the spectrum for viruses that evolved in human patients, but was highly consistent with spectra associated with evolution in a mouse cellular environment. Furthermore, mutations in the Omicron spike protein significantly overlapped with SARS-CoV-2 mutations known to promote adaptation to mouse hosts, particularly through enhanced spike protein binding affinity for the mouse cell entry receptor. Collectively, our results suggest that the progenitor of Omicron jumped from humans to mice, rapidly accumulated mutations conducive to infecting that host, then jumped back into humans, indicating an inter-species evolutionary trajectory for the Omicron outbreak.

DJ.....So an Alpha or Wuhan (wild type) ended up in a mouse and developed further for over a year then ending up in a human host...(not a recombination but a long list of mutations. With Omicron some of the mutations linking it to mice-specific mutation processes.)

[url]https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0251368#sec015[/url] or https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0251368#sec015 (may 2021) ; Our pairwise homoplasy index tests suggest that, among continental datasets, European and North American sequences have shown evidence for the presence of recombination events (P-value = 0.001 and 0.007 respectively); while African, Oceanic, South American, and Asian datasets have shown no recombination events. The recombination events in European population were further confirmed with significant P-values by MaxChi2, Chimera, and 3Seq tools, while possible recombination events in North American populations were confirmed by MaxChi2 and 3Seq tools. This indicates once more that European and North American populations are at higher risk of coinfection with different SARS-CoV-2 variants simultaneously. The recombination effects might also lead to deletion of big portions of RNA such as the one reported in Holland et al. paper, where an 81-nucleotide deletion was detected in SARS-CoV-2 ORF7a [39]. Similar deletions might decrease viral fitness and affect COVID-19 pandemic trajectory.

DJ Lack of testing/sequencing outside Europe/North America may be one of the reasons we did not see recombinations there. Also China most likely managed to limit the number of cases so also limiting risks for recombinations....

My impression-as a non-expert just trying to make sense; STOP THE SPREAD !!!!! Playing with fire !!!!!

It is not "if" but "when" we get much worse virusses...Due to inaction this pandemic most likely allready is multi-species with variants very likely jumping from one species/host to others-and back. For most countries testing is allready beyond capacity...sequencing much to limited...with increasing risks tests fail to pick up newest variants (the tests look for often three segments...one of them 69/70 is missing in Alpha and Omicron BA.1...so those kind of PCR tests may pick up BA.1 Omicron sub variants fast...). 

This pandemic can easily get totally out of control and uncontrolable-untill we have new tests-in "no time"....

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote KiwiMum Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: December 27 2021 at 11:32am

Here's an article in the UK's Daily Mail today talking about the Draconian restrictions in Xi'an but making no mention at all of hemorrhagic fever. It does say that there is a complete ban on driving anywhere for any reason. That's extreme.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10346999/Chinas-Covid-19-surge-continues-new-epicentre-Xian-despite-draconian-lockdown.html


Those who got it wrong, for whatever reason, may feel defensive and retrench into a position that doesn’t accord with the facts.
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote Dutch Josh Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: December 27 2021 at 8:19pm

[url]https://www.moonofalabama.org/2021/12/china-but-at-what-cost.html[/url] or https://www.moonofalabama.org/2021/12/china-but-at-what-cost.html ...western propaganda by embedded "free press" not doing a good job...part of a problem not of a solution...

Just my opinion, DJ

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.
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