Influenza Division, National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Disease, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, Georgia, USA.
J Virol. 2013 Jul;87(14):7864-73. doi: 10.1128/JVI.00719-13. Epub 2013 May 8.
Influenza viruses pose a major public health burden to communities around the world by causing respiratory infections that can be highly contagious and spread rapidly through the population. Despite extensive research on influenza viruses, the modes of transmission occurring most often among humans are not entirely clear. Contributing to this knowledge gap is the lack of an understanding of the levels of infectious virus present in respirable aerosols exhaled from infected hosts. Here, we used the ferret model to evaluate aerosol shedding patterns and measure the amount of infectious virus present in exhaled respirable aerosols. By comparing these parameters among a panel of human and avian influenza viruses exhibiting diverse respiratory droplet transmission efficiencies, we are able to report that ferrets infected by highly transmissible influenza viruses exhale a greater number of aerosol particles and more infectious virus within respirable aerosols than ferrets infected by influenza viruses that do not readily transmit. Our findings improve our understanding of the ferret transmission model and provide support for the potential for influenza virus aerosol transmission.
流感病毒通过引起呼吸道感染，对全球社区构成重大公共卫生负担，这些感染具有很强的传染性，可在人群中迅速传播。尽管对流感病毒进行了广泛的研究，但人类中最常发生的传播模式并不完全清楚。造成这一知识空白的原因是，人们对感染宿主呼出的可吸入气溶胶中存在的传染性病毒水平缺乏了解。在这里，我们使用雪貂模型来评估气溶胶释放模式，并测量呼出的可吸入气溶胶中存在的传染性病毒量。通过比较表现出不同呼吸道飞沫传播效率的一组人源和禽源流感病毒的这些参数，我们能够报告说，由高度传染性流感病毒感染的雪貂呼出的气溶胶颗粒数量以及可吸入气溶胶中的传染性病毒数量均多于由不易传播的流感病毒感染的雪貂。我们的研究结果加深了对雪貂传播模型的理解，并为流感病毒气溶胶传播的可能性提供了支持。
