Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Hepatitis E
Summary
Hepatitis E is inflammation of the liver caused by infection with the hepatitis E virus (HEV); it is a type of viral hepatitis. Hepatitis E has mainly a fecal-oral transmission route that is similar to hepatitis A, although the viruses are unrelated. In retrospect, the earliest known epidemic of hepatitis E occurred in 1955 in New Delhi, but the virus was not isolated until 1983 by Russian scientists investigating an outbreak in Afghanistan. HEV is a positive-sense, single-stranded, nonenveloped, RNA icosahedral virus and one of five known human hepatitis viruses: A, B, C, D, and E.
Like hepatitis A, hepatitis E usually follows an acute and self-limiting course of illness (the condition is temporary and the individual recovers) with low death rates in resource-rich areas; however, it can be more severe in pregnant women and people with a weakened immune system, with substantially higher death rates. In pregnant women, especially in the third trimester, the disease is more often severe and is associated with a clinical syndrome called fulminant liver failure, with death rates around 20%. Whereas pregnant women may have a rapid and severe course, organ transplant recipients who receive medications to weaken the immune system and prevent organ rejection can develop a slower and more persistent form called chronic hepatitis E, which is so diagnosed after 3 months of continuous viremia. HEV can be clustered genetically into 8 genotypes, and genotypes 3 and 4 tend to be the ones that cause chronic hepatitis in the immunosuppressed.
In 2017, hepatitis E was estimated to affect more than 19 million people. Those most commonly at risk of HEV are men aged 15 to 35 years of age. A preventive vaccine (HEV 239) is approved for use in China.
The average incubation period of hepatitis E is 40 days, ranging from 2 to 8 weeks. After a short prodromal phase symptoms may include jaundice, fatigue, and nausea, though most HEV infections are asymptomatic. The symptomatic phase coincides with elevated hepatic aminotransferase levels.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.