A mysterious new virus is slowly but surely creeping through rural corners of China. Up until recently, the cause of the illness was not clear, but a new study may have pinned down the culprit: a nasty blood-sucking tick. [...]
Reporting in the New England Journal of Medicine, their discovery is based on a sample of the virus taken from the blood of a 42-year-old female farmer from Alongshan who became ill with a fever, headache, and nausea. After the virus was isolated from her blood, genome sequence analysis and electron microscopy showed that it was, indeed, a virus that had never been documented before. Importantly, doctors also noticed she had a history of tick bites. [...]
Lo and behold, they discovered the virus was found in the ticks. More surprisingly, evidence of the virus also showed up in mosquitoes collected in the province of Jilin, meaning they cannot be excluded as possible vectors too. While the virus has only been reported in northeastern China so far, the researchers argue it could potentially spread elsewhere as the tick is found across East Asia, Siberia, Eastern Europe, and Northern Europe.
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