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0:00
Hello. My name is Benhur Lee.
I'm a professor of
Microbiology at
the Icahn School of
Medicine at Mount Sinai.
Today, we're going to talk
about paramyxoviruses,
their biology and
pathogenesis with
a special emphasis
on Nipah virus,
a dangerous and
virulent pathogen
that you'll hear about today.
0:25
Set the stage. This
is the outline
of the topics I'll
cover in today's talk.
I will start with
an introduction
to put the paramyxoviruses
in context.
Then I'll talk briefly about
the zoonotic nature
and virulence of
Nipah virus which belongs to
a group of viruses
called Henipavirus.
Then I will mention
the general
characteristic features
of paramyxoviruses and
in so doing talk
about the targets
for therapeutic interventions
and drug development.
Lastly, I will end with talking
about Henipavirus
receptor usage,
how it gets into
certain cells and
how that is related
to its pathogenesis.
1:12
To put it in context,
paramyxoviruses are one of
the most contagious viral
pathogens that infect humans.
As you can see from
the table below,
these are the various diseases
that most people may have
heard of and we
think that you know
the immediately past pandemic
SARS-CoV-2 was quite bad
and scientists characterize how
contagious an agent
is by the R_0 value.
This is the basic
reproductive number which
quantifies the contagiousness or
transmissibility of
infectious pathogens.
As you can see down there
at the bottom of the list,
SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2
are about 2-5.
The big 1918 pandemic
influenza is also about 2-5.
Ebola that was all over the
news was only about 1.5-2.5.
But looking at measles
and mumps, which are
the prototypical paramyxoviruses
that most people have heard
of have extremely
high R_0 values.
In fact, measles
was thought to be
the most contagious
viral pathogen that we
know of and that's why we study
paramyxoviruses and
especially Nipah.
Currently, Nipah
virus has an R_0 of
less than one which means that
it's likely not to
result in an epidemic.
But if it ever evolves
to have a high R_0,
we would be in big
trouble because
Nipah viruses are much more
deadly than measles and mumps.
