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More than 200 people have died and thousands more have been sickened by the new corona virus spreading in China. A few cases have been confirmed outside China, and the World Health Organization is closely monitoring the situation. How worried about a new pandemic should we be? Virus researcher Ali Mirazimi, adjunct professor at the Department of Laboratory Medicine at Karolinska Institutet, gives us his perspective.

The search for a cure to AIDS has partly focused on ways to eradicate infected cells. Now, new research from Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and the University of Pennsylvania in the U.S. shows that this approach may not be necessary for a functional cure. In a study focusing on a subset of HIV-positive individuals who can live with the virus without needing treatment, the researchers found that these people’s lymphocytes suppress the virus but do not kill off infected cells.

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet have developed a new method to separate between two different types of a common herpes virus (HHV-6) that has been linked to multiple sclerosis. By analyzing antibodies in the blood against the most divergent proteins of herpesvirus 6A and 6B, the researchers were able to show that MS-patients carry the herpesvirus 6A to a greater extent than healthy individuals. The findings, published in Frontiers in Immunology, point to a role for HHV-6A in MS development.

Gunilla Karlsson Hedestam and Ganesh Phad publish in the Journal of Experimental Medicine