Will Mayaro virus be responsible for the next outbreak of an arthropod-borne virus in Brazil?

Abstract

Mayaro virus is an alphavirus from the Togaviridae family and is transmitted mainly by Hemagogus mosquitoes. This virus circulates in high-density tropical forests or rural areas of Central and South America causing a disease characterized by high-grade fever, maculopapular skin rash and marked arthralgia that, in some patients, can persist for long periods after infection and may be misinterpreted as chikungunya. Although only a few outbreaks involving this virus have been reported, in the last years the number of Mayaro virus infections has increased in the central and northern regions of Brazil. In this review, we describe the reported prevalence of this infection over the years and discuss the circumstances that can contribute to the establishment of an urban mayaro virus epidemic in Brazil and the problems encountered with the specific diagnosis, especially the antigenic cross-reactivity of this pathogen with other viruses of the same family.

Keywords: Alphavirus; Chikungunya virus; Epidemiology; Mayaro virus; Outbreaks.

Fig. 1

A schematic Mayaro virus genome organization and its replication complex.

Fig. 2

Molecular phylogenetic analysis of some clinically important alphaviruses using Maximum Likelihood method. A representative strain of each species, with a complete genome deposited at NCBI website, was used to construct the phylogenetic tree. A total of 9946 positions were analyzed in the final dataset. The numbers above branches indicate the evolutionary distance (branch length). Evolutionary analyses were conducted using MEGA7 software. The strains of mayaro virus used to assemble this phylogeny were BeAr20290⁽⁵⁾ for genotype L and BeH186258 for genotype D.