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Deep Learning Technology: Sebastian Arnold, Betty van Aken, Paul Grundmann, Felix A. Gers and Alexander Löser. Learning Contextualized Document Representations for Healthcare Answer Retrieval. The Web Conference 2020 (WWW'20)
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TORCH syndrome can be prevented by treating an infected pregnant person, thereby preventing the infection from affecting the fetus.
Developing countries are more severely affected by TORCH syndrome.
The spread of chickenpox can be prevented by isolating affected individuals. Contagion is by exposure to respiratory droplets, or direct contact with lesions, within a period lasting from three days before the onset of the rash, to four days after the onset of the rash. The chickenpox virus is susceptible to disinfectants, notably chlorine bleach (i.e., sodium hypochlorite). Like all enveloped viruses, it is sensitive to desiccation, heat and detergents.
Treatment mainly consists of easing the symptoms. As a protective measure, people are usually required to stay at home while they are infectious to avoid spreading the disease to others. Cutting the nails short or wearing gloves may prevent scratching and minimize the risk of secondary infections.
Although there have been no formal clinical studies evaluating the effectiveness of topical application of calamine lotion (a topical barrier preparation containing zinc oxide, and one of the most commonly used interventions), it has an excellent safety profile. It is important to maintain good hygiene and daily cleaning of skin with warm water to avoid secondary bacterial infection. Scratching may also increase the risk of secondary infection.
Paracetamol (acetaminophen) but not aspirin may be used to reduce fever. Aspirin use by someone with chickenpox may cause the serious, sometimes fatal disease of the liver and brain, Reye syndrome. People at risk of developing severe complications who have had significant exposure to the virus may be given intra-muscular varicella zoster immune globulin (VZIG), a preparation containing high titres of antibodies to varicella zoster virus, to ward off the disease.
Antivirals are sometimes used.
Most of the time, Zika fever resolves on its own in 2 to 7 days, but rarely, some people develop Guillain–Barré syndrome. The fetus of a pregnant woman who has Zika fever may die or be born with congenital central nervous system malformations, like microcephaly.
There is currently no specific treatment for Zika virus infection. Care is supportive with treatment of pain, fever, and itching. Some authorities have recommended against using aspirin and other NSAIDs as these have been associated with hemorrhagic syndrome when used for other flaviviruses. Additionally, aspirin use is generally avoided in children when possible due to the risk of Reye syndrome.
Zika virus had been relatively little studied until the major outbreak in 2015, and no specific antiviral treatments are available as yet. Advice to pregnant women is to avoid any risk of infection so far as possible, as once infected there is little that can be done beyond supportive treatment.
There are a number of shingles vaccines which reduce the risk of developing shingles or developing severe shingles if the disease occurs. They include a live-virus vaccine and a non-live subunit vaccine.
A review by Cochrane concluded that the live vaccine was useful for preventing shingles for at least three years. This equates to about 50% relative risk reduction. The vaccine reduced rates of persistent, severe pain after shingles by 66% in people who contracted shingles despite vaccination. Vaccine efficacy was maintained through four years of follow-up. It has been recommended that people with primary or acquired immunodeficiency should not receive the live vaccine.
Two doses of an adjuvanted herpes zoster subunit vaccine had levels of protection of about 90% at 3.5 years. So far it has been studied in people with an intact immune system. It appear to also be effective in the very old.
Herpesviral Encephalitis can be treated with high-dose intravenous acyclovir. Without treatment, HSE results in rapid death in approximately 70% of cases; survivors suffer severe neurological damage. When treated, HSE is still fatal in one-third of cases, and causes serious long-term neurological damage in over half of survivors. Twenty percent of treated patients recover with minor damage. Only a small population of survivors (2.5%) regain completely normal brain function. Indeed, many amnesic cases in the scientific literature have etiologies involving HSE. Earlier treatment (within 48 hours of symptom onset) improves the chances of a good recovery. Rarely, treated individuals can have relapse of infection weeks to months later. There is evidence that aberrant inflammation triggered by herpes simplex can result in granulomatous inflammation in the brain, which responds to steroids. While the herpes virus can be spread, encephalitis itself is not infectious. Other viruses can cause similar symptoms of encephalitis, though usually milder (Herpesvirus 6, varicella zoster virus, Epstein-Barr, cytomegalovirus, coxsackievirus, etc.).
Paravaccinia virus originates from livestock infected with bovine papular stomatitis. When a human makes physical contact with the livestock's muzzle, udders, or an infected area, the area of contact will become infected. Livestock may not show symptoms of bovine papular stomatitis and still be infected and contagious. Paravaccinia can enter the body though all pathways including: skin contact by mechanical means, through the respiratory tract, or orally. Oral or respiratory contraction may be more likely to cause systemic symptoms such as lesions across the whole body
A person who has not previously been infected with paravaccinia virus should avoid contact with infected livestock to prevent contraction of disease. There is no commercially available vaccination for cattle or humans against paravaccinia. However, following infection, immunization has been noted in humans, making re-infection difficult. Unlike other pox viruses, there is no record of contracting paravaccinia virus from another human. Further, cattle only show a short immunization after initial infection, providing opportunity to continue to infect more livestock and new human hosts.
Key measures to prevent outbreaks of the disease are maintaining hygiene standards and using screening to exclude persons with suspicious infections from engaging in contact sports. A skin check performed before practice or competition takes place can identify individuals who should be evaluated, and if necessary treated by a healthcare professional. In certain situations, i.e. participating in wrestling camps, consider placing participants on valacyclovir 1GM daily for the duration of camp. 10-year study has shown 89.5% reduction in outbreaks and probable prevention of contracting the virus. Medication must be started 5 days before participation to ensure proper concentrations exist.
Lesions of paravaccinia virus will clear up with little to no scaring after 4 to 8 weeks. An antibiotic may be prescribed by a physician to help prevent bacterial infection of the lesion area. In rare cases, surgical removal of the lesions can be done to help increase rate of healing, and help minimize risk of bacterial or fungal infection. Upon healing, no long term side effects have been reported.
Treatment for zoster ophthalmicus is similar to standard treatment for shingles at other sites. A recent trial comparing aciclovir with its prodrug, valaciclovir, demonstrated similar efficacies in treating this form of the disease. The significant advantage of valaciclovir over aciclovir is its dosing of only 3 times/day (compared with aciclovir's 5 times/day dosing), which could make it more convenient for people and improve adherence with therapy.
The mainstay of eradication is the identification and removal of persistently infected animals. Re-infection is then prevented by vaccination and high levels of biosecurity, supported by continuing surveillance. PIs act as viral reservoirs and are the principal source of viral infection but transiently infected animals and contaminated fomites also play a significant role in transmission.
Leading the way in BVD eradication, almost 20 years ago, were the Scandinavian countries. Despite different conditions at the start of the projects in terms of legal support, and regardless of initial prevalence of herds with PI animals, it took all countries approximately 10 years to reach their final stages.
Once proven that BVD eradication could be achieved in a cost efficient way, a number of regional programmes followed in Europe, some of which have developed into national schemes.
Vaccination is an essential part of both control and eradication. While BVD virus is still circulating within the national herd, breeding cattle are at risk of producing PI neonates and the economic consequences of BVD are still relevant. Once eradication has been achieved, unvaccinated animals will represent a naïve and susceptible herd. Infection from imported animals or contaminated fomites brought into the farm, or via transiently infected in-contacts will have devastating consequences.
Herpes outbreaks should be treated with antiviral medications like Acyclovir, Valacyclovir, or Famcyclovir, each of which is available in tablet form.
Oral antiviral medication is often used as a prophylactic to suppress or prevent outbreaks from occurring. The recommended dosage for suppression therapy for recurrent outbreaks is 1,000 mg of valacyclovir once a day or 400 mg Acyclovir taken twice a day. In addition to preventing outbreaks, these medications greatly reduce the chance of infecting someone while the patient is not having an outbreak.
Often, people have regular outbreaks of anywhere from 1 to 10 times per year, but stress (because the virus lies next to the nerve cells), or a weakened immune system due to a temporary or permanent illness can also spark outbreaks. Some people become infected but fail to ever have a single outbreak, although they remain carriers of the virus and can pass the disease on to an uninfected person through asymptomatic shedding (when the virus is active on the skin but rashes or blisters do not appear).
The use of antiviral medications has been shown to be effective in preventing acquisition of the herpes virus. Specific usage of these agents focus on wrestling camps where intense contact between individuals occur on a daily basis over several weeks. They have also been used for large outbreaks during seasonal competition, but further research needs to be performed to verify efficacy.
In the United States there are typically between a couple of hundred and a couple of thousand cases a year.
The most common preventative measure against mumps is a vaccination with a mumps vaccine, invented by American microbiologist Maurice Hilleman at Merck. The vaccine may be given separately or as part of the MMR immunization vaccine that also protects against measles and rubella. In the US, MMR is now being supplanted by MMRV, which adds protection against chickenpox (varicella, HHV3). The WHO (World Health Organization) recommends the use of mumps vaccines in all countries with well-functioning childhood vaccination programmes. In the United Kingdom it is routinely given to children at age 13 months with a booster at 3–5 years (preschool) This confers lifelong immunity. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends the routine administration of MMR vaccine at ages 12–15 months and at 4–6 years. In some locations, the vaccine is given again between four and six years of age, or between 11 and 12 years of age if not previously given. The efficacy of the vaccine depends on the strain of the vaccine, but is usually around 80 percent. The Jeryl Lynn strain is most commonly used in developed countries but has been shown to have reduced efficacy in epidemic situations. The Leningrad-Zagreb strain commonly used in developing countries appears to have superior efficacy in epidemic situations.
Because of the outbreaks within college and university settings, many governments have established vaccination programs to prevent large-scale outbreaks. In Canada, provincial governments and the Public Health Agency of Canada have all participated in awareness campaigns to encourage students ranging from grade one to college and university to get vaccinated.
Some anti-vaccine activists protest against the administration of a vaccine against mumps, claiming that the attenuated vaccine strain is harmful, and/or that the wild disease is beneficial. There is no evidence whatsoever to support the claim that the wild disease is beneficial, or that the MMR vaccine is harmful. Claims have been made that the MMR vaccine is linked to autism and inflammatory bowel disease, including one study by Andrew Wakefield. The paper was discredited and retracted in 2010 and Wakefield was later stripped of his license after his work was found to be an "elaborate fraud". Also, subsequent studies indicate no link between vaccination with the MMR and autism. Since the dangers of the disease are well known, and the dangers of the vaccine are quite minimal, most doctors recommend vaccination.
The WHO, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Academy of Family Physicians, the British Medical Association and the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain currently recommend routine vaccination of children against mumps. The British Medical Association and Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain had previously recommended against general mumps vaccination, changing that recommendation in 1987.
Before the introduction of the mumps vaccine, the mumps virus was the leading cause of viral meningoencephalitis in the United States. However, encephalitis occurs rarely (less than two per 100,000). In one of the largest studies in the literature, the most common symptoms of mumps meningoencephalitis were found to be fever (97 percent), vomiting (94 percent) and headache (88.8 percent). The mumps vaccine was introduced into the United States in December 1967: since its introduction there has been a steady decrease in the incidence of mumps and mumps virus infection. There were 151,209 cases of mumps reported in 1968. From 2001 to 2008, the case average was only 265 per year, excluding an outbreak of less than 6000 cases in 2006 attributed largely to university contagion in young adults.
Modern vaccination programmes aim not only to provide a high level of protection from clinical disease for the dam, but, crucially, to protect against viraemia and prevent the production of PIs. While the immune mechanisms involved are the same, the level of immune protection required for foetal protection is much higher than for prevention of clinical disease.
While challenge studies indicate that killed, as well as live, vaccines prevent foetal infection under experimental conditions, the efficacy of vaccines under field conditions has been questioned. The birth of PI calves into vaccinated herds suggests that killed vaccines do not stand up to the challenge presented by the viral load excreted by a PI in the field.
The risk of transmission from mother to baby is highest if the mother becomes infected around the time of delivery (30% to 60%), since insufficient time will have occurred for the generation and transfer of protective maternal antibodies before the birth of the child. In contrast, the risk falls to 3% if the infection is recurrent, and is 1–3% if the woman is seropositive for both HSV-1 and HSV-2, and is less than 1% if no lesions are visible. Women seropositive for only one type of HSV are only half as likely to transmit HSV as infected seronegative mothers. To prevent neonatal infections, seronegative women are recommended to avoid unprotected oral-genital contact with an HSV-1-seropositive partner and conventional sex with a partner having a genital infection during the last trimester of pregnancy. Mothers infected with HSV are advised to avoid procedures that would cause trauma to the infant during birth (e.g. fetal scalp electrodes, forceps, and vacuum extractors) and, should lesions be present, to elect caesarean section to reduce exposure of the child to infected secretions in the birth canal. The use of antiviral treatments, such as acyclovir, given from the 36th week of pregnancy, limits HSV recurrence and shedding during childbirth, thereby reducing the need for caesarean section.
Acyclovir is the recommended antiviral for herpes suppressive therapy during the last months of pregnancy. The use of valaciclovir and famciclovir, while potentially improving compliance, have less-well-determined safety in pregnancy.
As with almost all sexually transmitted infections, women are more susceptible to acquiring genital HSV-2 than men. On an annual basis, without the use of antivirals or condoms, the transmission risk of HSV-2 from infected male to female is about 8–11%.
This is believed to be due to the increased exposure of mucosal tissue to potential infection sites. Transmission risk from infected female to male is around 4–5% annually. Suppressive antiviral therapy reduces these risks by 50%. Antivirals also help prevent the development of symptomatic HSV in infection scenarios, meaning the infected partner will be seropositive but symptom-free by about 50%. Condom use also reduces the transmission risk significantly. Condom use is much more effective at preventing male-to-female transmission than "vice versa". Previous HSV-1 infection may reduce the risk for acquisition of HSV-2 infection among women by a factor of three, although the one study that states this has a small sample size of 14 transmissions out of 214 couples.
However, asymptomatic carriers of the HSV-2 virus are still contagious. In many infections, the first symptom people will have of their own infections is the horizontal transmission to a sexual partner or the vertical transmission of neonatal herpes to a newborn at term. Since most asymptomatic individuals are unaware of their infection, they are considered at high risk for spreading HSV.
In October 2011, the anti-HIV drug tenofovir, when used topically in a microbicidal vaginal gel, was reported to reduce herpes virus sexual transmission by 51%.
GBS is also an important infectious agent able to cause invasive infections in adults. Serious life-threatening invasive GBS infections are increasingly recognized in the elderly and in individuals compromised by underlying diseases such as diabetes, cirrhosis and cancer. GBS infections in adults include urinary tract infection, skin and soft-tissue infection (skin and skin structure infection) bacteremia without focus, osteomyelitis, meningitis and endocarditis.
GBS infection in adults can be serious, and mortality is higher among adults than among neonates.
In general, penicillin is the antibiotic of choice for treatment of GBS infections. Erythromycin or clindamycin should not be used for treatment in penicillin-allergic patients unless susceptibility of the infecting GBS isolate to these agents is documented. Gentamicin plus penicillin (for antibiotic synergy) in patients with life-threatening GBS infections may be used.
Though the introduction of national guidelines to screen pregnant women for GBS carriage and the use of IAP has significantly reduced the burden of GBS-EOD disease, it has had no effect on preventing either GBS-LOD in infants or GBS infections in adults. Because of this, if an effective vaccine against GBS were available, it would be an effective means of controlling not only GBS disease in infants, but also infections in adults. The capsular polysaccharide of GBS, which is an important virulence factor, is also an excellent candidate for the development of an effective vaccine. As early as 1976, low levels of maternal antibodies against the capsular polysaccharide were shown to be correlated with susceptibility to GBS-EOD and GBS-LOD. Maternal-specific antibodies, transferred from the mother to the newborn, were able to confer protection to babies against GBS infection.
Vaccination is considered an ideal solution to prevent not only GBS-EOD and GBS-LOD, but also infections in adults at risk. Nevertheless, though research and clinical trials for the development of an effective vaccine to prevent GBS infections are underway, no vaccine is available in 2016. At present, the licensing of GBS vaccines is difficult because of the challenge in conducting efficacy clinical trials in humans due to the low incidence of GBS neonatal diseases.
, no approved vaccines are available. A phase-II vaccine trial used a live, attenuated virus, to develop viral resistance in 98% of those tested after 28 days and 85% still showed resistance after one year. However, 8% of people reported transient joint pain, and attenuation was found to be due to only two mutations in the E2 glycoprotein. Alternative vaccine strategies have been developed, and show efficacy in mouse models. In August 2014 researchers at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in the USA were testing an experimental vaccine which uses virus-like particles (VLPs) instead of attenuated virus. All the 25 people participated in this phase 1 trial developed strong immune responses. As of 2015, a phase 2 trial was planned, using 400 adults aged 18 to 60 and to take place at 6 locations in the Caribbean. Even with a vaccine, mosquito population control and bite prevention will be necessary to control chikungunya disease.
A vaccine is available in the UK and Europe, however in laboratory tests it is not possible to distinguish between antibodies produced as a result of vaccination and those produced in response to infection with the virus. Management also plays an important part in the prevention of EVA.
Some vertically transmitted infections, such as toxoplasmosis and syphilis, can be effectively treated with antibiotics if the mother is diagnosed early in her pregnancy. Many viral vertically transmitted infections have no effective treatment, but some, notably rubella and varicella-zoster, can be prevented by vaccinating the mother prior to pregnancy.
If the mother has active herpes simplex (as may be suggested by a pap test), delivery by Caesarean section can prevent the newborn from contact, and consequent infection, with this virus.
IgG antibody may play crucial role in prevention of intrauterine infections and extensive research is going on for developing IgG-based therapies for treatment and vaccination.
Vaccines are available (ATCvet codes: for the inactivated vaccine, for the live vaccine, plus various combinations).
Given that avian reovirus infections are widespread, the viruses are relatively resistant outside the host, and that vertical and horizontal transmission occurs, eradicating avian reovirus infection in commercial chicken flocks is very unlikely. In addition, absence of detectable seroconversion and failure to detect virus in cloacal swabs are unreliable indicators of resisting infection, or transmission via the egg. Thus, the most proactive and successful approach to controlling this disease is through vaccination. Since chicks are more prone to being detrimentally affected by the disease right after hatching, vaccine protocols that use live and killed vaccines are designed to provide protection during the very early stages of life. This approach has been accomplished through active immunity after early vaccination and a live vaccine or passive immunity from maternal antibodies followed with vaccination of the breeder hens. Currently, efforts toward administering inactivated or live vaccines to breeding stock to allow passive immunity to the offspring via the yolk are being taken.