A lab worker student at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, is the first person in the US to come down with cowpox, a less dangerous relative of smallpox, and the culprit is the laboratory contamination. Researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported last week at the International Meeting on Emerging Diseases and Surveillance in Vienna that non-vaccinated patient was infected with a strain of vaccinia GM in its research laboratory, one she had never even worked through handling contaminated materials inadvertently.
cowpox exists in the wild in Europe and Asia, where it is carried by rats and other animals and is often reported among veterinarians and zoo workers, but is not the United States, except in research laboratories. It can seriously affect immunocompromised patients, but are not usually lethal. CDC continues to recommend smallpox vaccination for all laboratory workers who come into contact with intact monkeypox, a category that includes vaccinia, cowpox, and other animal viruses. The patient refused cowpox vaccination since it does not intend to treat the virus, and the laboratory has not worked on cowpox for 5 years prior to the incident.
However, CDC researchers found the DNA of cowpox in many places around the lab and allegedly harmless virus stocks, although no live pox virus was found on surfaces. The student said she did not remember an injury or a needle stick before developing a painful lesion on his finger in July 2010, it appeared that the infection probably occurred during handling chemicals and contaminated samples. In October, a biopsy was sent to the CDC, who worked with the Ministry of the Illinois Public Health (IDPH) to identify the disease as cowpox caused by a modified virus strains stored in the freezer laboratory.
Mary Reynolds, an epidemiologist at the CDC's Division of High Consequence Pathogens and Pathology who worked on the study, said that CDC and IDPH made safety recommendations at the University of department of biological safety Illinois that are currently under consideration. University spokeswoman Robin Kaler said that if the investigation showed that the laboratory followed the campus policy established for the storage of hazardous materials, the campus is taking steps to ensure that all people in a laboratory with such materials are aware of safety procedures. The laboratory staff has been working with investigators to monitor infection and concluded that there is no data from the contaminated samples were published.
Gigi Kwik Gronvall of the Center for Biosecurity at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center in Baltimore, Maryland, called the incident "an example of many examples that speaks of the need for more vigilance "in laboratory practices. Infections caused by the laboratories, she said, could be much more common than reported, partly because laboratories do not want to blame and partly because, in the absence of a needle stick, patients hard to pinpoint why they are sick. Identify the cause may be particularly difficult in the case of infection by recombinant organisms, which must be reported to the National Institutes of Health and CDC. The symptoms of a patient may be different from those caused by wild organism. Fortunately, in this case the distinct pustule formed by cowpox was said.
"We become very interested in the concept of people inadvertently be infected with recombinant organisms, not necessarily because of a high security risk, but because of the challenge it provides to services State health to confirm the diagnosis, "Reynolds said. Genetically modified virus may confuse the methods of sequencing DNA standard used to identify the virus and make it even more difficult to track down the source. Reynolds said investigators from the CDC began working with the National Institutes of Health Office of biotechnology activities and public health agencies of the state to discuss better ways to diagnose these infections.
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