New markers expedite yellow fever detection

A recently published The Lancet Infectious Diseases article detailed the identification of new markers aiding the effort to expedite the timeframe of Yellow Fever detection.

“Many patients admitted to the health services with a diagnosis of yellow fever aren’t initially severely ill,” Esper Kallás, full professor in the Department of Infectious and Parasitic Diseases at the University of São Paulo’s Medical School (FM-USP) in Brazil, said. “They may even walk into the hospital. However, within days they can become very sick indeed, and a fairly significant proportion die. We had no previous knowledge of markers that could be used by medical teams to assess each patient’s prognosis and identify those most likely to develop severe illness to treat them accordingly, improving the probability of recovery.”

Researchers learned the older the patient, the more severe the yellow fever illness tended to be; a high neutrophil count, high hepatic aspartate aminotransferase (AST) and high viral load at hospital admission were also significantly associated with mortality; and increased viral load was one of the markers of severity identified by the study.

“Put yourself in the shoes of a doctor examining a patient who’s been diagnosed with yellow fever and has just been hospitalized,” Kallás said. “Until now, there was no way of knowing the patient’s probable prognosis. The medical staff had to wait and see whether the patient’s condition would deteriorate, and this typically happens very fast. A patient with all the markers of severity at the moment of admission runs the greatest risk of dying, so staff will be able to set priorities and allocate patients to intensive care rapidly.”