The mosquito-transmitted Keystone virus has been discovered in humans for the first time | Smart news

In August 2016, a 16-year-old boy in Florida went to an emergency clinic with a rash and a mild fever. Florida was in the midst of the Zika outbreak, so doctors took samples of the teenager to test the virus. But the lab tests were negative for Zika and other related infections, leaving doctors wondering what had made the boy sick.

Dr. Glenn Morris, director of the Emerging Pathogens Institute at the University of Florida, tells Daylina Miller of WUSF News that "it literally took a year and a half of hard laboratory work to understand what this virus was." Now scientists have revealed the answer to this medical mystery in the review Clinical Infectious Diseases: Teenage symptoms, they report, were caused by the Keystone virus, an infection transmitted by a mosquito that has never been detected in humans.

The Keystone virus is named after the Hillsborough County area in Florida, where it was discovered in 1964. The virus is known to infect animals, including raccoons, squirrels and white-tailed deer. who live in coastal areas extending from Texas to Chesapeake Bay. The case of the Florida teenager marks the first time that Keystone has been found in humans.

Well before 2016, however, there was evidence that people had been infected with the virus. A 1972 article in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene reported that Keystone antibodies were found in about one in five people tested in the Tampa Bay area, according to a statement from the University of Florida.

Keystone is thought to be mainly transmitted by the Aedes Atlanticus mosquito, reports Ed Cara of Gizmodo. Keystone belongs to the California serogroup of viruses, known to cause encephalitis, or acute inflammation of the brain, in several species including humans. Fortunately, the first known patient of Keystone has not reported such serious symptoms. But scientists at the University of Florida discovered that the virus was developing well in brain cells of mice, suggesting that Keystone could pose a risk of brain infection in humans.

In the statement from the University of Florida, Morris calls for further research on vector-borne diseases like the Keystone virus, which he says could have infected many more people than researchers did. had realized before.

"Although the virus has never been found in humans, the infection can be quite common in North Florida," he said. "It's one of those cases where if you do not know how to look for something, you do not find it."

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