An outbreak of acute haemorrhagic conjunctivitis associated with coxsackievirus A24 variant in The Gambia, West Africa

Abstract

Objective: An outbreak of acute haemorrhagic conjunctivitis occurred in The Gambia, West Africa in 2011. Affected individuals presented with conjunctival haemorrhages, swelling and ocular discharge. In an effort to identify a causative agent of the disease, ocular swabs were taken from patients during the acute and convalescent phases. Total RNA was extracted from all samples and reverse-transcriptase PCR performed using primers specific for all enteroviruses. Resulting amplicons were sequenced and data compared to known sequences using the BLAST algorithm.

Results: Forty-eight swabs were included in the analysis. Of these, 21 acute and 9 convalescent swabs (65% of the total) gave positive PCR results. Sequence analysis of the resulting amplicons indicated 99% sequence identity with coxsackievirus A24 variant identified during independent outbreaks of acute haemorrhagic conjunctivitis around the world and suggest the Gambian outbreak was due to this virus.

Keywords: Acute haemorrhagic conjunctivitis; Apollo 11 disease; Coxsackievirus A24 variant; The Gambia.

Fig. 1

Multiple sequence alignment generated in T-Coffee [16]. Consensus sequence data obtained from ocular swabs from Gambian patients presenting with acute haemorrhagic conjunctivitis (AHC) in comparison to CVA24v (GenBank Accession No. KR399988) and EV70 (GenBank Accession No. D00820)