Abstract
Introduction
Human adenoviruses (HAdVs) can cause acute respiratory diseases (ARD) worldwide and HAdV-55 is a reemergent pathogen in recent years. In the study, we investigated an outbreak of ARD at a school due to HAdV-55 in Beijing, China during the early outbreak of COVID-19.
Methods
The epidemic prevention team was dispatched to the school to collect epidemiologic data and nasopharyngeal samples. Then, rRT-PCR and multiplex PCR assays were used to detect SARS-CoV-2 and other respiratory pathogens respectively. One representative HAdV-55 isolate was selected and submitted for whole-genome sequencing using a MiSeq system and the whole-genome phylogenetic tree was conducted based on maximum likelihood method.
Results
The outbreak lasted from January 27 to February 6, 2020, and 108 students developed fever among which 60 (55.56%) cases were diagnosed with HAdV-55 infection in laboratory using real-time PCR and 56 cases were hospitalized. All the confirmed cases had fever and 11 cases (18.33%) presented fever above 39℃. Other main clinical symptoms included sore throat (43.33%) and headache (43.33%). We obtained and assembled the full genome of one isolate, BJ-446, with 34,761 nucleotides in length. HAdV-55 isolate BJ-446 was 99.85% identical to strain QS-DLL which was the first HAdV-55 strain in China isolated from an ARD outbreak in Shanxi in 2006. One and four amino acid mutations were observed in hexon gene and the coding region of L2 pV 40.1 kDa protein, respectively.
Conclusions
We identified the first HAdV-55 infection associated with the ARD outbreak in Beijing since the emerging of COVID-19. The study suggests that improved surveillance of HAdV is needed though the COVID-19 is still prevalent in the world.
This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
No comments:
Post a Comment