Australia's Ross River Virus: The Next Global Epidemic?
The virus has been thought to be restricted largely to Australia and Papua New Guinea where it is harboured by marsupial animals, specifically kangaroos and wallabies, and spread by mosquitoes.
Published online ahead of print in the International Journal of Infectious Diseases, the research shows that the virus may have been circulating silently in the South Pacific ever since a large epidemic of more than 500,000 cases in 1979-80, thought to have been started by an infected Australian tourist who travelled to Fiji.
Credit: University of Adelaide
“Ross River Virus is found naturally in Australia, where it was circulating in kangaroos and wallabies long before the arrival of the first Australians over 40,000 years ago,” says one of the project leaders Professor Phil Weinstein, Professorial Research Fellow with the University of Adelaide’s School of Biological Sciences.
The 1979 epidemic in the Pacific Islands Countries and Territories was the first time that RRV had ‘escaped’ from its marsupial reservoir. But without marsupials, the epidemic burned itself out the following year – or so it was thought.
“The first clues about local transmission in the Pacific Islands came when more recent tourists from New Zealand and Canada who had been to the South Pacific, but not Australia, were diagnosed with RRV when they returned home,” Professor Weinstein says.
Credit: Photo: Dr Emily Flies
In partnership with French collaborators in Tahiti and France, the researchers tested blood samples of American Samoans.
“There are no marsupials in American Samoa, so the only reasonable conclusion is that the virus was able to circulate in local mammals rather than marsupials. If RRV can circulate in non-marsupials in the South Pacific, then it can find a home anywhere in the world.
“Isolation of the virus from non-marsupials will provide us with definitive evidence that RRV can become endemic globally.”
Professor Weinstein says: “With the large number of Australians now travelling, it would not be unreasonable to expect one or more tourists to carry RRV overseas to seed a new epidemic. With the right conditions, this could take off globally in exactly the same way that Zika did.”
Contacts and sources:
Professor Philip Weinstein, Professorial Research Fellow,
Dr Colleen Lau, NHMRC Research Fellow
Source:
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Such scare mongering. Typical of gov’t controlled sickness industry.
People have been CURING this Ross River Fever virus by GRABBING electric fences and taking a couple hits of good old Virus zapping DC. There are better ways to “zap” oneself with commercial zappers’ but the electric fence whilst invigorating to the extreme works every time.
Well certainly it may not be an official ‘cure’ but if that is the treatment I for one will never complain about the disease especially if they get creative where they put the cathode.