Recent Advancements in the Influenza and other Respiratory Virus Research

Dear Colleagues,

Respiratory viral infections are one of the leading causes of annual morbidity and mortality imposing a significant disease burden worldwide. The severity of the respiratory illness may vary from the milder and asymptomatic respiratory tract infection to severe wheezing, bronchiolitis, or pneumonia. Respiratory viruses such as the influenza viruses, parainfluenza viruses, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) or the respiratory adenoviruses have been the major concerns affecting not only infants and children but also the young by imposing a large and intermittent burden on the health care infrastructure. These viruses often share tropism with cells of the respiratory tract and show rapid transmission through air/aerosols or via direct-indirect contact with infected persons imposing significant disease burden than any other disease.

Influenza viruses, among all these, continuously acquire point mutations while circulating in wide range of hosts, ranging from wild aquatic birds to mammals, including humans. The wide range of host very often provides opportunities of genetic re-assortment, leading to the emergence of zoonotic strains that may cause pandemics leading to a severe impact on human life. The 2009-influenza pandemic is the recent example of the ability of a virus to undergo genetic re-assortment and spread with an unprecedented speed and become global health concern. The other respiratory viruses also impose severe threat to life of infants, immunocompromised adults and other high risk groups that closely work with infected patients. Vaccination is still the best strategy for management of these respiratory viruses, although there are some major challenges due to the inadequate response during immunization of young infants and the circulation of the antigenically distinct viral strains. It is very important to timely diagnose these viral infections as they often have overlapping clinical presentations and cause both upper respiratory tract infection (URTI) and LRTI, and often misdiagnosed by attending physicians unless a laboratory diagnosis is done for the causative agent.

A continuous surveillance must be implemented across the globe to monitor the changing epidemiology and pathogenesis of these respiratory viruses. We need more advanced understanding of the viral pathobiology, development of better and effective vaccines and antiviral strategies to manage such infections.

In this special issue, we aim to assemble a collection of original research and review articles to provide a comprehensive view on the recent research advancements made towards the changing epidemiology, the evolutionary patterns, pathogenesis mechanisms, diagnostics, and management of these major respiratory viral infections.

The potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Recent reports of emerging and reemerging respiratory viral infections
• Changing patterns in the epidemiology of respiratory viruses
• Mechanisms of viral pathogenesis
• Evolutionary and transmission patterns of respiratory viruses
• Advancements made in the vaccine development and antiviral strategies
• Recent developments in the diagnostics of respiratory viruses

Dr. Binod Kumar
Dr. Kumari Asha
Dr. Melvin Sanicas
Dr. Clement Meseko
Guest Editors

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• Influenza virus
• RSV, Adenovirus, parainfluenza virus
• Epidemiology
• vaccines
• antiviral strategy
• viral diagnosis
• viral evolution