Vial of deadly Guanarito virus has gone missing

Guanarito isn't a terrible new tortilla chip flavor, it's a deadly virus with the potential to cause hemorrhagic fever. Luckily, this virus spreads mainly between rodents, and only occasionally has the virus made the jump to human hosts. Human-to-human transition is considered very rare at this point.

That's the good news. The bad news is, a vial of the stuff is missing from a secure laboratory facility in Galveston, TX. A routine inspection on March 21 and 22 revealed the virus to be missing from the locked freezer where it is usually kept. On March 23, the president of University of Texas Medical Branch made a public statement emphasizing that "less than a quarter teaspoon" of the virus was missing, and that there was no evidence of wrongdoing involved. They believe it is "likely but not confirmed" that the virus sample was destroyed by accident as part of the lab's everyday cleaning procedures.

The sample of Guanarito virus was being kept in a Biosafety Level 4 laboratory, partly because the virus has potential for being aerosolized and weaponized. The mortality rate for humans who contract the virus is up to 33 percent, which is startlingly high for a viral infection.

The virus's normal means of transmission involves a rodent which is only native to Venezuela, the short-tailed cane mouse. It causes Venezuelan hemorrhagic fever, which causes "fever and malaise followed by hemorrhagic manifestations and convulsions." Treatment options are essentially limited to supportive care (like IV fluids) and the broad-spectrum antiviral drug Ribavirin. We do not currently have a vaccine against Venezuelan hemorrhagic fever, which has 618 recorded cases from 1989-2006.

Guanarito is an arenavirus, related to other viruses responsible for hemorrhagic fevers in humans. Hemorrhagic fever became the boogeyman of the 1990s, after several high-profile outbreaks of Ebola virus plus a popular novel by Richard Preston brought the illness to national attention.

Image courtesy Flckr/Horia Varlan