A Systematic Approach to Novel Virus Discovery in Emerging Infectious Disease Outbreaks

The discovery of novel viruses is of great importance to human health—both in the setting of emerging infectious disease outbreaks and in disease syndromes of unknown etiology. Despite the recent proliferation of many efficient virus discovery methods, careful selection of a combination of methods is important to demonstrate a novel virus, its clinical associations, and its relevance in a timely manner. The identification of a patient or an outbreak with distinctive clinical features and negative routine microbiological workup is often the starting point for virus hunting.

Source: Journal of Molecular Diagnostics - March 3, 2015 Category: Pathology Authors: Siddharth Sridhar, Kelvin K.W. To, Jasper F.W. Chan, Susanna K.P. Lau, Patrick C.Y. Woo, Kwok-Yung Yuen Tags: Review Source Type: research