Please choose your delivery country and your customer group
Adenoviruses are the leading cause of reported illness and lost work time among basic trainees in the Department of Defense. Last year, a new serotype of adenovirus (Ad14) emerged in the United States and caused several severe outbreaks of febrile respiratory infection and pneumonia among both recruits and civilians. One death was reported among recruits. This paper describes a novel method for discriminating the otherwise identical strains of this virus circulating at different sites, and describes the epidemiological conclusions reached using the new method to track those strains. Different recruit sites were affected by different strains of Ad14, and those strains were stably associated with specific sites for several months at a time. Several readily discernable variants of the identified strain marker (a microsatellite DNA sequence) were discovered, allowing simple methods to be used to discriminate the observed site-specific strains. These data show that those strains were endemic to those sites, and that transmission between recruits in the training was the primary source of infection (as opposed to redundant re-importation from civilian communities with the incoming recruits). Analysis of the highly variable strain marker described in this work is shown to be an effective way to discriminate otherwise identical adenoviruses.