Epidemiology of Viliuisk encephalomyelitis in Eastern Siberia.

Background: Viliuisk encephalomyelitis is a disorder that starts, in most cases, as an acute meningoencephalitis. Survivors of the acute phase develop a slowly progressing neurologic syndrome characterized by dementia, dysarthria, and spasticity. An epidemic of this disease has been spreading throughout the Yakut Republic of the Russian Federation.

A proposal for new criteria for the classification of hantaviruses, based on S and M segment protein sequences.

Hantaviruses, members of the family Bunyaviridae, are the causative agents of hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome and hantavirus cardiopulmonary syndrome. Hantaviruses are currently demarcated into species based on the guidelines provided by the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV). These guidelines however, are often ignored by the descriptors of novel hantaviruses.

Review. Kuru and its contribution to medicine.

The solution of kuru led us to the solution of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and to the elucidation, in humans and other species, of previously unknown mechanisms of infection. These require very close three-dimensional matching, which determines infectious nucleant or prion activity. Evidence for nucleation processes is found widely in the organic and inorganic worlds and in the interactions between them: in the formation of amyloid fibrils; in the biochemistry of silicon; in cave formations deep in the Earth; and in outer space.

Family clustering of Viliuisk encephalomyelitis in traditional and new geographic regions.

Viliuisk encephalomyelitis is an acute, often fatal, meningoencephalitis that tends to develop into a prolonged chronically progressive panencephalitis. Clinical, neuropathologic, and epidemiologic data argue for an infectious cause, although multiple attempts at pathogen isolation have been unsuccessful. To assess mechanisms of disease transmission and spread, we studied 6 multiplex families.