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The Black Death and Other Pandemics
Published in Scott M. Jackson, Skin Disease and the History of Dermatology, 2023
The next epidemic disease to discuss as it relates to the skin is yellow fever, but the only cutaneous symptom of this disease is jaundice, the yellowing of the skin caused by liver damage that occurs in 15 percent of cases. Yellow fever is a typically short-lived viral disease that is transmitted by the bite of a mosquito (Aedes aegypti) infected with an RNA flavivirus. The classic symptoms of yellow fever are fever, nausea, back pain, and headache, all of which improve in just a few days. For the unlucky ones who get liver damage, the yellowing of the skin (jaundice) typically starts at the end of the first week, when the fever breaks and the patient starts to improve symptomatically. Around 30 percent of persons with jaundice die from liver failure.106 It is a gruesome way to go, as the liver failure causes impaired coagulation, and the infected vomit blood and bleed from every orifice.
Taming the Enemy
Published in Norman Begg, The Remarkable Story of Vaccines, 2023
These attenuated vaccines (often referred to as live attenuated vaccines or replicating vaccines) have a number of advantages over inactivated vaccines. Because they are alive, they grow and multiply in your body. This means your immune system gets a continuous stimulus over several days or even weeks. Live attenuated vaccines provide stronger, and longer-lasting immunity than killed ones. Yellow fever is a live attenuated vaccine; a single dose will protect you for life. There are some downsides, however. The ability of live vaccines to multiply means that they can produce symptoms of the disease, albeit a much milder version. Measles vaccine is a good example. It’s quite common for a child to develop a rash and mild fever about a week after the vaccine; a “mini measles”. Very rarely, a live vaccine can produce a full-blown version of the disease. Paralysis following live polio vaccination (the version that is given by mouth) occurs at a rate of about one per 2 million doses. This is still much better than the actual disease, where up to one in ten people who are infected will get paralysis, however, it is one of the reasons why most polio vaccines given nowadays are the killed version, which cannot cause paralysis. Another drawback of live vaccines is that they cannot be given to people with severely weakened immune systems, as they may not be able to control the replication of the organism. Examples of live attenuated vaccines include measles, mumps, rubella, yellow fever, BCG (for tuberculosis) and oral polio vaccine.
Diseases of the Hepatobiliary Tree and Pancreas Associated with Fever
Published in Benedict Isaac, Serge Kernbaum, Michael Burke, Unexplained Fever, 2019
Yellow fever — Occurring principally in Africa and in Central and South America, this is a mosquito-transmitted infection characterized by fever, headache, nausea, epistaxis and jaundice. Clues to diagnosis include relative bradycardia, albuminuria and early leukopenia.
Vogt–Koyanagi–Harada-like Disease following Yellow Fever Vaccination
Published in Ocular Immunology and Inflammation, 2021
Wesley R. Campos, Sarah P. F. Cenachi, Matheus Schmidt Soares, Priscila Freitas Gonçalves, Daniel V. Vasconcelos-Santos
Magnetic resonance imaging of the head and chest X-ray were unremarkable. Tuberculin skin test, as well as serological tests for hepatitis B and C, herpes simplex virus, human T-lymphotropic virus, HIV, and syphilis (venereal diseases research laboratory and fluorescent treponemal antibody absorption tests), was negative. Positive results were only for anti-cytomegalovirus and anti-varicella zoster virus IgG antibodies, and not IgM, in the serum. Results of other investigations were unremarkable, including full blood count, C-reactive protein, erythrocyte sedimentation rate, serum rheumatoid factor, angiotensin-converting enzyme, antinuclear antibodies, and antineutrophilic cytoplasmic antibodies (p- and c-antineutrophilic cytoplasmic antibodies). Lumbar puncture was performed and disclosed mild cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) pleocytosis (cells/mm3, with predominance of neutrophilic granulocytes −60%) and increased protein level (55 mg%). RNA of yellow fever virus was not found in serum or CSF by reverse-transcriptase polymerase chain reaction, and no pathogens were detected in cerebrospinal fluid culture.
Dengue Maculopathy Associated with Choroidopathy and Pseudohypopyon: A Case Series
Published in Ocular Immunology and Inflammation, 2018
Christina W. K. Ng, P. Y. Tai, Shelina Oli Mohamed
Dengue is a mosquito-borne viral disease. Dengue virus is a Flaviviridae of four serotypes (DEN-1, DEN-2, DEN-3, and DEN-4) transmitted by infected female mosquitoes Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus. The mosquitoes also transmit yellow fever, chikungunya, and Zika infection. Dengue is found in tropical and subtropical climates worldwide, mostly in urban and semi-urban areas. It has rapidly spread in recent years and is now endemic in more than 100 countries in regions of the Americas, South-East Asia, Western Pacific, Africa, and the Eastern Mediterranean.1 The first three regions are the most seriously affected. A recent multinational study estimated there to be 390 million dengue infections per year, of which 96 million manifest clinically.2 In Malaysia, since the year 2000, the incidence of dengue infection increased from 32 cases per 100 000 population to 361 cases per 100 000 population in 2014.3
Understanding modern-day vaccines: what you need to know
Published in Annals of Medicine, 2018
Volker Vetter, Gülhan Denizer, Leonard R. Friedland, Jyothsna Krishnan, Marla Shapiro
Many of the first vaccines that were produced consisted of live attenuated vaccines, such as rabies, smallpox, tuberculosis, yellow fever and OPV, some of which are still in use. A successful example is the yellow fever vaccine YF-17D. It was developed in the 1930s by attenuating a yellow fever virus strain by more than 200 serial passages through monkeys and cultures of mouse and chicken embryonic tissues [13]. All currently-used yellow fever vaccines derive from this attenuated strain [13]. In addition, YF-17D has been used to produce vaccines against two closely related viruses, Japanese encephalitis (IMOJEV, Sanofi Pasteur) and dengue (Dengvaxia, Sanofi Pasteur), by replacing the genes encoding the antigenic proteins by their equivalents [14,15].