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Clinical samples collected in coronavirus disease 19 (COVID-19), patients are commonly manipulated in biosafety level 2 laboratories for molecular diagnostic purposes. Here, we tested French norm NF-EN-14476+A2 derived from European standard EN-14885 to assess the risk of manipulating infectious viruses prior to RNA extraction. SARS-CoV-2 cell-culture supernatant and nasopharyngeal samples (virus-spiked samples and clinical samples collected in COVID-19 patients) were used to measure the reduction of infectivity after 10 min contact with lysis buffer containing various detergents and chaotropic agents. A total of thirteen protocols were evaluated. Two commercially available formulations showed the ability to reduce infectivity by at least 6 log 10, whereas others proved less effective.

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Children are less affected by COVID-19 than adults. 1 But, a small proportion of children develop paediatric inflammatory multisystem syndrome, 2 with potentially lethal consequences. Studies have also described persistent long COVID symptoms that last more than 4 weeks from the onset of illness, including fatigue, muscle weakness, dyspnoea, chest pain, cough and anosmia. 2-5 However, information on paediatric long COVID remains scarce and studies often describe hospitalised populations. 2,3 We report the first 201 paediatric patients under 16 years old that were tested positive for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in Marseille public hospitals during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in France. We described the acute symptoms and long-term consequences of COVID-19 in the children, who were mostly outpatients.Polymerase chain reaction assays were performed on nasopharyngeal swabs from 27 February to 15 May 2020, and the data were collected by Marseille university hospital.

The emergence of several SARS-CoV-2 variants raised numerous questions concerning the future course of the pandemic. We are currently observing a replacement of the circulating viruses by the variant from the United Kingdom known as 20I/501Y.V1, from the B.1.1.7 lineage, but there is little biological evidence that this new variant exhibits a different phenotype.

Success in smallpox eradication was enabled by the absence of non-human reservoir for smallpox virus. However, other poxviruses with a wider host spectrum can infect humans and represent a potential health threat to humans, highlighted by a progressively increasing number of infections by (re)emerging poxviruses, requiring new improved diagnostic and epidemiological tools. We describe here a real-time PCR assay targeting a highly conserved region of the poxvirus genome, thus allowing a pan-Poxvirus detection (Chordopoxvirinae and Entomopoxvirinae). This system is specific (99.8% for vertebrate samples and 99.7% for arthropods samples), sensitive (100% for vertebrate samples and 86.3% for arthropods samples) and presents low limit of detection (< 1000 DNA copies/reaction). In addition, this system could be also valuable for virus discovery and epidemiological projects.

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Description of five cases of bartonellosis with fever and atypical clinical presentations in kidney transplant recipients : thrombotic microangiopathies, recurrent haemophagocytosis and immune reconstitution syndrome after treatment. The diagnosis, the pathological lesions, and treatments are described. Bartonellosis must be researched in solid organ transplant recipients with fever of undetermined origin.