Guillain-Barré syndrome and dengue-like disease in 2015: temporal relationship in Piauí state and implications on Zika virus surveillance

Secretaria de Estado da Saúde do Piauí. Instituto de Doenças Tropicais Natan Portella. Teresina, PI, Brasil / Fundação Municipal de Saúde de Teresina. Diretoria de Vigilância em Saúde. Teresina, PI, Brasil.Ministério da Saúde. Secretaria de Vigilância em Saúde. Instituto Evandro Chagas. Ananindeua, PA, Brasil.Secretaria de Estado da Saúde do Piauí. Gerência de Vigilância em Saúde. Teresina, PI, Brasil.Universidade Federal do Piauí. Departamento de Medicina Especializada. Teresina, PI, Brasil.Ministério da Saúde. Secretaria de Vigilância em Saúde. Instituto Evandro Chagas. Ananindeua, PA, Brasil.Secretaria de Estado da Saúde do Piauí. Gerência de Vigilância em Saúde. Teresina, PI, Brasil.Ministério da Saúde. Secretaria de Vigilância em Saúde. Instituto Evandro Chagas. Belém, PA, Brasil.Ministério da Saúde. Secretaria de Vigilância em Saúde. Instituto Evandro Chagas. Belém, PA, Brasil.Fundação Municipal de Saúde de Teresina. Diretoria de Vigilância em Saúde. Teresina, PI, Brasil.Ministério da Saúde. Secretaria de Vigilância em Saúde. Instituto Evandro Chagas. Belém, PA, Brasil

Natural infection of Aedes aegypti by Chikungunya and Dengue type 2 Virus in a transition area of north-northeast Brazil

Dengue fever, chikungunya, and Zika are diseases caused by viruses transmitted by Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus. In Brazil, the number of human infections is high, but few studies are performed in mosquito vectors. This study aimed to investigate the presence of Zika, Dengue and Chikungunya viruses in Ae. aegypti and Ae. albopictus from the municipalities of Alto Alegre, Caxias, Codó, and São Mateus do Maranhão, located in the state of Maranhão, Northeast Brazil. The mosquitoes were collected with a mechanical aspirator, identified, triturated, and then submitted to RNA extraction and RT-qPCR. The positive samples were confirmed by virus isolation and genome sequencing. Three hundred and forty-eight Ae. aegypti (176 males and 172 females) and 12 Ae. albopictus (eight males and four females) were collected and tested. Ae. aegypti was the only vector positive in two municipalities-Codó, with detection of Chikungunya virus (CHIKV) belonging to the East-Central-South African genotype, and in Caxias, with detection of Dengue virus (DENV)-2 belonging to the Asian/American genotype. The detection of CHIKV and DENV-2 is evidence that those viruses are maintained in arthropod vectors, and shows the epidemiological risk in the area for chikungunya cases and a possible increase of severe dengue cases, associated with the occurrence of dengue hemorrhagic fever. © 2019 by the authors

Análise dos registros das prescrições medicamentosas em um hospital universitário

OBJETIVO: analisar as prescrições medicamentosas em três unidades de internação de um hospital universitário no estado de Sergipe. MÉTODO: estudo descritivo, transversal e documental. Os dados foram coletados nas unidades de internação pelo período de 10 dias durante o mês de março de 2012. A amostra compreendeu 286 prescrições com 2.605 itens referentes a medicamentos. A pesquisa foi aprovada pelo Comitê de Ética e Pesquisa da Universidade Federal de Sergipe, sob o nº CAAE 0263.0.107.000-11. RESULTADOS: do total das prescrições analisadas, 48% estavam digitadas, em 98% não constava o número do registro do paciente e 100,0% continham abreviaturas e siglas. Das 4.522 doses medicamentosas prescritas, foi observada prevalência de ausência da forma farmacêutica, nome do fármaco e outros dados relativos à medicação. CONCLUSÃO: a existência de inadequações nos registros das prescrições medicamentosas comprovou que a administração de medicamentos na instituição pode apresentar riscos à segurança do paciente, indicando a necessidade de implementar ações corretivas

Avaliação do perfil de expressão de genes relacionados a via de microrna’s e apotose em células neurais infectadas experimentalmente pelo vírus Zika (ZIKV) / Evaluation of the expression of genes related to the microrna's via and apotose in neural cells experimentally infected by Zika Virus (ZIKV)

O vírus zika é um arbovírus transmitido por mosquitos Aedes, com ocorrência descrita juntamente com o aumento da microcefalia em recém nascidos. Tendo em vista a gravidade associada aos casos de microcefalia e outras desordens neurológicas, a Organização Mundial da Saúde chegou a caracterizá-lo como sendo de Emergência de Saúde Pública de Importância Nacional. O objetivo deste trabalho foi determinar o perfil de expressão de genes que codificam proteínas-chave relacionadas ao microRNA e vias de apoptose em células neurais de roedores da família Muridae infectadas por esse vírus. As células neurais infectadas foram Neuro-2a, e os métodos empregados foram reação quantitativa em cadeia da transcrição reversa-polimerase e bioluminescência. A produção viral e a ativação da caspase-3/7 foram maiores às 96 horas após a infecção, bem como a expressão de genes que codificam Ago1, DGCR8, RIG-I e FAS-L

SARS-CoV-2 introductions and early dynamics of the epidemic in Portugal

Genomic surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 in Portugal was rapidly implemented by the National Institute of Health in the early stages of the COVID-19 epidemic, in collaboration with more than 50 laboratories distributed nationwide. Methods By applying recent phylodynamic models that allow integration of individual-based travel history, we reconstructed and characterized the spatio-temporal dynamics of SARSCoV-2 introductions and early dissemination in Portugal. Results We detected at least 277 independent SARS-CoV-2 introductions, mostly from European countries (namely the United Kingdom, Spain, France, Italy, and Switzerland), which were consistent with the countries with the highest connectivity with Portugal. Although most introductions were estimated to have occurred during early March 2020, it is likely that SARS-CoV-2 was silently circulating in Portugal throughout February, before the first cases were confirmed. Conclusions Here we conclude that the earlier implementation of measures could have minimized the number of introductions and subsequent virus expansion in Portugal. This study lays the foundation for genomic epidemiology of SARS-CoV-2 in Portugal, and highlights the need for systematic and geographically-representative genomic surveillance.We gratefully acknowledge to Sara Hill and Nuno Faria (University of Oxford) and Joshua Quick and Nick Loman (University of Birmingham) for kindly providing us with the initial sets of Artic Network primers for NGS; Rafael Mamede (MRamirez team, IMM, Lisbon) for developing and sharing a bioinformatics script for sequence curation (https://github.com/rfm-targa/BioinfUtils); Philippe Lemey (KU Leuven) for providing guidance on the implementation of the phylodynamic models; Joshua L. Cherry (National Center for Biotechnology Information, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health) for providing guidance with the subsampling strategies; and all authors, originating and submitting laboratories who have contributed genome data on GISAID (https://www.gisaid.org/) on which part of this research is based. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not reflect the view of the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Health and Human Services, or the United States government. This study is co-funded by Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia and Agência de Investigação Clínica e Inovação Biomédica (234_596874175) on behalf of the Research 4 COVID-19 call. Some infrastructural resources used in this study come from the GenomePT project (POCI-01-0145-FEDER-022184), supported by COMPETE 2020 - Operational Programme for Competitiveness and Internationalisation (POCI), Lisboa Portugal Regional Operational Programme (Lisboa2020), Algarve Portugal Regional Operational Programme (CRESC Algarve2020), under the PORTUGAL 2020 Partnership Agreement, through the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), and by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Geography and ecology shape the phylogenetic composition of Amazonian tree communities

Aim: Amazonia hosts more tree species from numerous evolutionary lineages, both young and ancient, than any other biogeographic region. Previous studies have shown that tree lineages colonized multiple edaphic environments and dispersed widely across Amazonia, leading to a hypothesis, which we test, that lineages should not be strongly associated with either geographic regions or edaphic forest types. Location: Amazonia. Taxon: Angiosperms (Magnoliids; Monocots; Eudicots). Methods: Data for the abundance of 5082 tree species in 1989 plots were combined with a mega-phylogeny. We applied evolutionary ordination to assess how phylogenetic composition varies across Amazonia. We used variation partitioning and Moran\u27s eigenvector maps (MEM) to test and quantify the separate and joint contributions of spatial and environmental variables to explain the phylogenetic composition of plots. We tested the indicator value of lineages for geographic regions and edaphic forest types and mapped associations onto the phylogeny. Results: In the terra firme and várzea forest types, the phylogenetic composition varies by geographic region, but the igapó and white-sand forest types retain a unique evolutionary signature regardless of region. Overall, we find that soil chemistry, climate and topography explain 24% of the variation in phylogenetic composition, with 79% of that variation being spatially structured (R$^{2}$ = 19% overall for combined spatial/environmental effects). The phylogenetic composition also shows substantial spatial patterns not related to the environmental variables we quantified (R$^{2}$ = 28%). A greater number of lineages were significant indicators of geographic regions than forest types. Main Conclusion: Numerous tree lineages, including some ancient ones (>66 Ma), show strong associations with geographic regions and edaphic forest types of Amazonia. This shows that specialization in specific edaphic environments has played a long-standing role in the evolutionary assembly of Amazonian forests. Furthermore, many lineages, even those that have dispersed across Amazonia, dominate within a specific region, likely because of phylogenetically conserved niches for environmental conditions that are prevalent within regions