Virus causing dengue has evolved dramatically in India, finds multi-institutional study
The HinduA multi-institutional study on dengue, led by the Indian Institute of Science, shows how the virus causing the disease has evolved dramatically over the last few decades in the Indian sub-continent. Dengue is a mosquito-borne viral disease that has steadily increased in the last 50 years, predominantly in the South-East Asian countries and there are four broad categories or serotypes of the dengue virus. Very different from original strains “We were trying to understand how different the Indian variants are, and we found that they are very different from the original strains used to develop the vaccines,” said Rahul Roy, Associate Professor, Department of Chemical Engineering, IISc., and corresponding author of the study published in PLoS Pathogens. But in recent years, Dengue 2 has become more dominant, while Dengue 4 – once considered the least infectious – is now making a niche for itself in South India, the researchers found.