Disease Resurgence, Production Capability Issues and Safety Concerns in the Context of an Aging Population: Is There a Need for a New Yellow Fever Vaccine?

Yellow fever is a potentially fatal, mosquito-borne viral disease that appears to be experiencing a resurgence in endemic areas in Africa and South America and spreading to non-endemic areas despite an effective vaccine. This trend has increased the level of concern about the disease and the potential for importation to areas in Asia with ecological conditions that can sustain yellow fever virus transmission. In this article, we provide a broad overview of yellow fever burden of disease, natural history, treatment, vaccine, prevention and control initiatives, and vaccine and therapeutic agent development efforts.

The development and approval of tecoviromat (TPOXX), the first antiviral against smallpox.

The classification of smallpox by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as a Category A Bioterrorism threat agent has resulted in the U.

Host-based antipoxvirus therapeutic strategies: turning the tables.

The potential threat of the smallpox virus as a bioterror weapon has long been recognized, and the need for developing suitable countermeasures has become especially acute following the events of September 2001. Traditional antiviral agents interfere with viral proteins or functions. In a new study, Yang et al.

Assembly of the human origin recognition complex.

The six-subunit origin recognition complex (ORC) was originally identified in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Yeast ORC binds specifically to origins of replication and serves as a platform for the assembly of additional initiation factors, such as Cdc6 and the Mcm proteins. Human homologues of all six ORC subunits have been identified by sequence similarity to their yeast counterparts, but little is known about the biochemical characteristics of human ORC (HsORC).

An intertypic herpes simplex virus helicase-primase complex associated with a defect in neurovirulence has reduced primase activity.

R13-1 is an intertypic recombinant virus in which the left-hand 18% of the herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1) genome is replaced by homologous sequences from HSV-2. R13-1 is nonneurovirulent and defective in DNA replication in neurons. The defect was localized to the UL5 open reading frame by using marker rescue analysis (D.