Blood virosphere in febrile Tanzanian children

Cordey, Samuel; Laubscher, Florian; Hartley, Mary-Anne; Junier, Thomas; Keitel, Kristina; Docquier, Mylene; Guex, Nicolas; Iseli, Christian; Vieille, Gaël; Le Mercier, Philippe; Gleizes, Anne; Samaka, Josephine; Mlaganile, Tarsis; Kagoro, Frank; Masimba, John; Said, Zamzam; Temba, Hosiana; Elbanna, Gasser H; Tapparel, Caroline; Zanella, Marie-Céline; Xenarios, Ioannis; Fellay, Jacques; D'Acremont, Valérie; Kaiser, Laurent

doi:10.1080/22221751.2021.1925161

Scientific article

English

Blood virosphere in febrile Tanzanian children

Published in

Emerging Microbes & Infections, vol. 10, no. 1, p. 982-993

Publication date

2021

Abstract

Viral infections are the leading cause of childhood acute febrile illnesses motivating consultation in sub-Saharan Africa. The majority of causal viruses are never identified in low-resource clinical settings as such testing is either not part of routine screening or available diagnostic tools have limited ability to detect new/unexpected viral variants. An in-depth exploration of the blood virome is therefore necessary to clarify the potential viral origin of fever in children. Metagenomic next-generation sequencing is a powerful tool for such broad investigations, allowing the detection of RNA and DNA viral genomes. Here, we describe the blood virome of 816 febrile children (<5 years) presenting at outpatient departments in Dar es Salaam over one-year. We show that half of the patients (394/816) had at least one detected virus recognized as causes of human infection/disease (13.8% enteroviruses (enterovirus A, B, C, and rhinovirus A and C), 12% rotaviruses, 11% human herpesvirus type 6). Additionally, we report the detection of a large number of viruses (related to arthropod, vertebrate or mammalian viral species) not yet known to cause human infection/disease, highlighting those who should be on the radar, deserve specific attention in the febrile paediatric population and, more broadly, for surveillance of emerging pathogens.Trial registration: ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT02225769.

UNIGE affiliation entities

UNIGE research groups

Funding

Swiss National Science Foundation - DNA and RNA viruses of the blood virome of allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplant recipients: a longitudinal observational study during a one-year period after transplantation - the Geneva Blood Virome Project (the GeBVir Project) [320030_179507]

Citation (ISO format)

CORDEY, Samuel et al. Blood virosphere in febrile Tanzanian children. In: Emerging Microbes & Infections, 2021, vol. 10, n° 1, p. 982–993. doi: 10.1080/22221751.2021.1925161

Article (Published version)

CC BY

Supplemental data

CC BY

Identifiers

PID : unige:155019
DOI : 10.1080/22221751.2021.1925161
PMID : 33929935

Datasets

https://github.com/SAFIA-HTS/VIRAL-HTS

Journal ISSN

2222-1751

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Creation

21/09/2021 08:46:00

First validation

21/09/2021 08:46:00

Update

10/02/2026 08:15:26

Status update

10/02/2026 08:15:26

Last indexation

02/11/2026 16:46:54

Blood virosphere in febrile Tanzanian children

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Published in

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Abstract

UNIGE affiliation entities

UNIGE research groups

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Citation (ISO format)

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Technical informations

Creation

First validation

Update

Status update

Last indexation