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An Emerging Human Parechovirus Type 5 Causing Sepsis-Like Illness in Infants in Australia - PubMed

  • ️Tue Jan 01 2019

An Emerging Human Parechovirus Type 5 Causing Sepsis-Like Illness in Infants in Australia

Anthony Chamings et al. Viruses. 2019.

Abstract

Human parechovirus (HPeV), particularly type 3 (HPeV3), is an important cause of sepsis-/meningitis-like illness in young infants. Laboratory records identified a total of ten HPeV-positive cases in Southeastern Australia between January and July 2019. The HPeV present in these cases were typed by Sanger sequencing of the partial viral capsid protein 1 (VP1) region and selected cases were further characterised by additional Sanger or Ion Torrent near-full length virus sequencing. In seven of the ten cases, an HPeV type 5 (HPeV5) was identified, and in the remaining three cases, an HPeV type 1 was identified. The HPeV5-positive cases were infants under the age of 3 months admitted to hospital with fever, rash, lethargy and/or sepsis-like clinical signs. Near full-length virus sequencing revealed that the HPeV5 was most likely a recombinant virus, with structural genes most similar to an HPeV5 from Belarus in 2018, and a polymerase gene most similar to an HPeV3 from Australia in 2013/14. While HPeV5 is not typically associated with severe clinical signs, the HPeV5 identified here may have been able to cause more severe disease in young infants through the acquisition of genes from a more virulent HPeV.

Keywords: genome sequencing; parechovirus; picornaviral epidemiology; recombination.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest. The funders had no role in the design of the study; in the collection, analyses, or interpretation of data; in the writing of the manuscript, or in the decision to publish the results.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1

SimPlot analysis was used to plot the degree of similarity between the HPeV5 G001-19 sequence and those of the closest near-full length sequences of HPeV5 (AM235749 [16]) and HPeV3 (KY556671 [4]) available in NCBI. The position of the 5’UTR, viral peptides and 3’UTR are shown below the plot.

Figure 2
Figure 2

Maximum-likelihood tree of 567nt of all HPeV5 VP1 sequences from the NCBI GenBank with >90% similarity to G001-19. The tree was generated in Mega X using the GTR+G+I model. Branch support was determined with 1000 bootstrap replicates, and is shown at each node. The near full-length 2019 recombinant HPeV5 sequences described here are in red.

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