Speaker
Description
Dengue disease is caused by four types of dengue virus, infecting an estimated 390 million people annually in endemic in tropical areas of the planet where the competent mosquito vector is available. Dengue viruses are thought to have emerged as a spillover from the sylvatic cycle, where the virus is transmitted among non-human primates in Southeast Asia and West and Central Africa. Based on phylogenetic analyses, it us understood that four independent spillover events resulted in the generation of the four virus types that circulate in humans today. It is recognized historically that contemporary transmission of sylvatic strains of dengue virus have infected humans at least from the 1960s, however these events have resulted in only one or very few infected humans. Different from those sporadic infections in humans, at least 2 very recent transmission chains, one in West Africa in 2020 and one in the Malayan archipelago in 2024, have resulted in multiple human infections that resemble endemic transmission, where the sylvatic strains were transmitted between humans via the mosquito vector. Here we perform a phylogenetic analysis comparing all the relevant genomic sequences from sylvatic dengue transmissions to humans and hypothesize that some of these strains could be poised to efficiently transmit among humans. We have demonstrated that in vitro, some of the sylvatic strains have differential potential to produce progeny in cell lines and primary cells from humans. These data grant the deeper phenotypical study of sylvatic strains, and it is essential to consider sylvatic dengue viruses as being on the brink of a new established spillover into humans.
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