Viral Infection

Rapid diagnostic tests, now synonymous with COVID-19, are instrumental to patient care, helping to improve antimicrobial therapy, patient outcomes and even infection control, experts said.

Myocarditis in children is most commonly caused by viral infection, although there are a variety of infectious and noninfectious causes, according to a scientific statement from the American Heart Association.

A study recently published in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine by Kenrie P.Y. Hui, PhD, and colleagues compared infection, replication competence, tropism and pathogenesis of the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 with other respiratory pathogens.

At Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York City, which accounts for more than 10,000 deaths in the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, Osama El Shamy, MD, works with other nephrologists and medical staff trying to make sense of why a growing percentage of patients experience AKI after being hospitalized.

Individuals who recover from COVID-19 infection may experience a significant neuropsychiatric burden long after the current pandemic, according to authors of a review article published in Brain, Behavior, and Immunity. Thus, researchers should conduct prospective neuropsychiatric and neuroimmune monitoring of those exposed to SARS-CoV-2 at various points in the life course to better understand the long-term impact of COVID-19, as well as to create a framework for the integration of psychoneuroimmunology into epidemiologic studies of pandemics, the authors noted.

The American College of Cardiology today announced it has canceled its annual Scientific Session together with the World Congress of Cardiology due to the increasing number of U.S. and worldwide travel advisories and restrictions placed on institutions and health care providers in response to the novel coronavirus outbreak.

In 2014, there was an unexpected surge in the number of children in the United States who experienced sudden unexplained limb weakness and paralysis, particularly after a viral illness. The seemingly new condition, now recognized as acute flaccid myelitis, or AFM, is a subset of acute flaccid paralysis.

A commercially available next-generation sequencing, or NGS, plasma assay demonstrated high sensitivity in both immunocompromised and non-immunocompromised children with one or more bacterial, viral or fungal infection compared with conventional diagnostic testing in a single-center study published in Open Forum Infectious Diseases.