Dengue, Zika and Chickungunya viruses

Published on January 31, 2018   36 min

A selection of talks on Infectious Diseases

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0:00
Hello. My name is Ana Fernandez-Sesma. I am a Professor in the Department of Microbiology at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. And today, I'm going to talk about Dengue, Zika, and Chickungunya viruses and some important background information, as well as how we believe they're really able to deal within our immunity in infected cells.
0:24
First, I want to introduce the concept of Arboviruses since there's really not a classification, but its basically referred to Arthropod Borne viruses and there are several families and genera that belong to these classification of Arboviruses and it includes the Togaviridae and Flaviviridae in particular. And today, we're going to talk about Alphaviruses, which include different viruses such as Equine Eastern Encephalitis, Western Equine Encephalitis, and Venezuelan Eastern Encephalitis that as the name indicates cause encephalitis, but also includes the infamous virus, Chickungunya virus that has caused some epidemics in the recent years, and that can cause febrile disease, and chronic arthritis in humans. Then it also includes a family of Flaviviridae that are all both, Togaviridae and Flaviviridae, at single strand positive RNA viruses and the Flaviviruses includes several known pathogens of humans such as West Nile virus, Japanese Encephalitis, St. Louis Encephalitis that they are causing encephalitis, then yellow fever virus that cause liver disease, and also Dengue, and Zika viruses. Dengue is most known for causing these febrile disease and Dengue hemorrhagic fever and we will talk a little bit in detail about these virus. And then Zika virus has been more notorious in the last year because it caused febrile disease. It had this severe association of fetal brain damage in infected pregnant women.