Alert level raised for Oropouche fever in Brazil and Amazon. It is a viral disease, transmitted by insect vectorswhich is frightening Latin America and also the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), which serves as the regional office for the Americas of the World Health Organization (WHO). The disease, caused by the Oropouche virus, has as its main vectors a small blood-sucking dipteran and the Culex quinquefasciatus mosquito, not present in Italy.
The case in Veneto
In mid-July, however, in our country, In Veneto, the first European case of Oropouche fever has been identifieddiagnosed by the Department of Tropical Infectious Diseases and Microbiology of the IRCCS Sacro Cuore Don Calabria in Negrar. The patient had a recent history of travel to the tropical Caribbean region.
The international study
Now an international study in which Marta Giovannetti and Massimo Ciccozzi of the Campus Bio-Medico University of Rome also participated, has investigated the Oropouche (Orov) virus. “We show how the virus evolved through genomic recombination and how it rapidly spread to several states in Brazil, causing the largest outbreak ever recorded outside the Amazon basin, including the first deaths ever detected – the study underlines -. This work underlines the need for greater epidemiological and genomic surveillance and the implementation of adequate responses to prevent Oropouche from becoming another public health threatspread by arboviruses”.
Oropouche (Orov) virus, first detected in Trinidad and Tobago in 1955, has historically been confined to the Amazon basin. However, since late 2022, Orov has been reported in northern Brazil as well as urban centers in Bolivia, Colombia, Cuba, and Peru.
“In collaboration with central public health laboratories in several regions of Brazil, we integrated epidemiological metadata with genomic analyses of recently sampled cases,” the researchers continued. “This initiative led to the generation of 133 complete genome sequences from the three genomic segments (L, M, and S) of the virus, including the first sequences obtained from regions outside the Amazon and from the first fatal cases ever recorded.”
“All 2024 genomes form a monophyletic group in the phylogenetic tree with sequences from the Amazon basin sampled from 2022. Our analyses revealed rapid movement of the virus from north to south from the Amazon basin to historically non-endemic regions. We – continues the study prepublished on the ‘MedRxiv’ platform – identified 21 recombination events, although it is not yet clear whether the genomic evolution of the virus has allowed the virus to adapt to local ecological conditions and evolve new phenotypes of public health importance”.
“Both the recent rapid spatial expansion and the first reported deaths associated with Oropouche underscore the importance of improving surveillance at the national and continental levels. With no apparent changes in the human population over the past 2 years, it is possible that viral adaptation, deforestation, and recent climate change, alone or in combination, have pushed Oropouche virus beyond the Amazon basin,” the research concludes.
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