Global & Disaster Medicine

Rift Valley Fever: It’s even more dangerous to fetuses than Zika.

January 11th, 2019

NYT

“…….Testing on human placental tissue revealed that, unlike the Zika virus, Rift Valley fever virus has a unique ability to infect a specialized layer of cells that supports the region of the placenta where nutrients flow in.

Zika must take the “side roads” into the placenta to infect a fetus, while the Rift Valley fever virus can take the “expressway,” Dr. Hartman said.

“The fetus is protected from hundreds of thousands of dangers that could affect it,” she added. “Only a few microbes can get past, and this is one of them.”…….”

Rift Valley Fever Distribution MapRift Valley Fever Distribution Map

Rift Valley Fever:  Document

Rift Valley fever virus induces fetal demise in Sprague-Dawley rats through direct placental infection

By Cynthia M. McMillen, Nitin Arora, Devin A. Boyles, Joseph R. Albe, Michael R. Kujawa, Jeffrey F. Bonadio, Carolyn B. Coyne, Amy L. Hartman

Science Advances05 Dec 2018 : eaau9812

This entry was posted on Friday, January 11th, 2019 at 11:25 am and is filed under Documents, Rift Valley Fever .
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.   Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Comments are closed.

Categories

Recent Posts

Archives

Admin