|
Treatment for Dengue Fever There is no vaccine to prevent dengue and no specific medicine to treat it, so the only defense is eradication of the mosquitoes that carry it and measures to protect people from mosquito bites. But hope is offered by research being carried out at the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research in San Antonio, which relies on very special mice. The small white animals with pink eyes are kept in a special isolated room so that they will not be exposed to any bacteria or germs that might infect them. They have been altered to be susceptible to human diseases. Lead researcher Rebecca Rico-Hesse says the mice have been modified or humanized by an infusion of stem cells taken from human umbilical cords that were discarded at local hospitals. We have basically reconstituted the human immune system in these mice and it is only because they have these immune system cells that they can get infected and show symptoms of dengue fever, she said. By infecting these humanized mice with strains of the dengue virus, investigators can study how the disease takes hold and what factors might cause the more serious and often deadly dengue hemorrhagic fever. A recent report co-authored by Rico-Hesse and her colleague Javier Mota shows for the first time why some strains of dengue virus are more severe than others. In this report, we present results of eight different virus strains and we show that the ones that have been associated with the more severe epidemics and the ones that cause hemorrhagic fever in patients are actually of a specific genetic variant, she said. | 
