Things that caught my admittedly very untrained eye in this article in the New England Journal of Medicine after the 2018-19 #HantaVirus / #AndesVirus outbreak in Argentina
https://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJMoa2009040
“Super-Spreaders” and Person-to-Person Transmission of Andes Virus in Argentina
The super-spreading capability of the #ANDV shows a facility (R>2) for sustaining continuous chains of transmission if no control measures are enforced.
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... The absence of evidence for #ANDV adaptation within or between hosts or for differences in viral diversity between spreaders and nonspreaders indicates that permissive ecology and social factors have a more substantial influence than genetic changes in sustaining person-to-person transmission in human hosts.
Although the Epuyén/18–19 and Epilink/96 sequences were sampled 22 years apart...
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few genomic mutations were identified among the strains involved in the outbreak that were transmitted from person to person.
In addition to their capabilities for sustaining person-to-person transmission, the genomic similarity of the Epuyén/18–19 and Epilink/96 strains suggests that they share the baseline genetic traits for ...
...successful cross-species transmission (facilitating spillover into humans) and transmission within a species (facilitating person-to-person transmission) without a need for adaptation to improve viral fitness, while a large number of contacts per infected patient and a sufficient critical community size (i.e., social gatherings and extensive contact) fueled early super-spreading events...
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... Genetic factors that facilitated person-to-person transmission may have been maintained in reservoir rodent host populations before the cross-species transmission that occurred in October 2018.
5/5
Just Your Luck, You'll Survive