Читать книгу Viruses: More Friends Than Foes (Revised Edition) - Karin Moelling - Страница 9

Seasonal flus are recurring events every winter season. The viruses causing it are respiratory viruses and there are about 200 different ones. Seven of them are the most frequent ones: Rhinoviruses comprise 100 types, which make up about 30 to 50% of all colds. Then there are the four types of coronaviruses, which are harmless relatives of the three coronaviruses which caused the pandemics. They cause about 15 to 20% of the winter season infections. We tend to neglect them. It is not even known, whether they are related serologically to the new CoV-2 in respect to antibody response. Their names are HCoV-229E, OC42, NL63, and HKuV. The type 229E is related to the camel virus MERS. Furthermore, there is the respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) which is responsible for 15 to 20% of infections during winter. Others are Parainfluenza viruses, Enteroviruses, and in children the Metapneumovirus. Sometimes eye infections show up, which may be caused by Adenoviruses.

Most of these viruses are single-stranded RNA viruses. As a consequence of the single-strands they can change rapidly, faster than double-stranded RNA or DNA viruses. The double-strand prevents changes, the mutations, and leads to more genetic stability of the viruses. Single-stranded RNA viruses can undergo rapid mutations, are innovative and escape from our immune response.