Mary Wilson
Well-known member
From dengue to Ebola, laboratories in Asia and Africa are using sequencing technology and skills acquired during the pandemic to track endemic diseases quickly.
15 December 2022
Smriti Mallapaty
When a three-year old boy in Cambodia came down with avian influenza last year, researchers at the Pasteur Institute of Cambodia in Phnom Penh used genome-sequencing technology bought during the COVID-19 pandemic to sequence samples from the boy in a single day. They confirmed that he had H9N2, a common virus found in birds. Later, they sequenced samples of the virus from a chicken living in the boy’s house, suggesting that that was how he was infected and that the virus was unlikely to spread to other people. Before the pandemic, samples would have been sent abroad for sequencing and such information would typically have taken weeks or months to arrive.
The lab is one of many across Asia and Africa that increased its sequencing capacity during the pandemic and is now looking beyond COVID-19 to study other diseases. “Since early 2022, we’ve been thinking about how to utilize this capacity for other pathogens”, such as cholera, malaria, polio and Ebola, says Sofonias Tessema, who heads the pathogen genomics programme at the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention in Addis Ababa.
Before the pandemic, genomic sequencing was mainly reserved for research in many regions, but now it is being used for public health, says Ruklanthi de Alwis, a viral immunologist at Duke–National University of Singapore (Duke–NUS) Medical School. Sequencing data combined with other clinical information can be used to diagnose diseases, identify chains of transmission, track mutations, trace outbreaks, speed up the public-health response and contribute to vaccine development. ...
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04453-2
15 December 2022
Smriti Mallapaty
When a three-year old boy in Cambodia came down with avian influenza last year, researchers at the Pasteur Institute of Cambodia in Phnom Penh used genome-sequencing technology bought during the COVID-19 pandemic to sequence samples from the boy in a single day. They confirmed that he had H9N2, a common virus found in birds. Later, they sequenced samples of the virus from a chicken living in the boy’s house, suggesting that that was how he was infected and that the virus was unlikely to spread to other people. Before the pandemic, samples would have been sent abroad for sequencing and such information would typically have taken weeks or months to arrive.
The lab is one of many across Asia and Africa that increased its sequencing capacity during the pandemic and is now looking beyond COVID-19 to study other diseases. “Since early 2022, we’ve been thinking about how to utilize this capacity for other pathogens”, such as cholera, malaria, polio and Ebola, says Sofonias Tessema, who heads the pathogen genomics programme at the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention in Addis Ababa.
Before the pandemic, genomic sequencing was mainly reserved for research in many regions, but now it is being used for public health, says Ruklanthi de Alwis, a viral immunologist at Duke–National University of Singapore (Duke–NUS) Medical School. Sequencing data combined with other clinical information can be used to diagnose diseases, identify chains of transmission, track mutations, trace outbreaks, speed up the public-health response and contribute to vaccine development. ...
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04453-2
