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Chapter One
Diagnostic Approaches
Katie Jeffery and Emma Aarons
INTRODUCTION
Human virus infections may affect all ages and assume
any degree of severity. They may be acute or chronic, be
recurrent or elicit lifelong immunity. They are acquired
through various routes via contact with humans, animals
or the environment. They present as various syndromes
involving fever, rash, arthralgia/myalgia, respiratory or
gastrointestinal disorders and occasionally serious organ
malfunction with deaths from pneumonia, cardiac, liver
or kidney failure or encephalitis. They have to be rapidly
distinguished from bacteriological and other infectious
and non-infectious diagnoses if the appropriate clinical
management is to be given.
Host factors are crucial to the outcome of virus
infections. For any virus infection, age may be critical
to determining outcome, those at extremes of age
being more vulnerable as a consequence of lack of immunocompetence,
inexperience of vaccination and waning
of immunity. For some infecti ... read full excerpt from Principles and Practice of Clinical Virology ebook
