By NewsDesk  @bactiman63

As part of its surveillance and vector control mission, the Agence Régionale de Santé Nouvelle-Aquitaine (ARS) confirmed on October 18 a case of arbovirosis in a person who had not left metropolitan France for the period before the appearance of the first signs of the disease.

Image/Robert Herriman

This person had frequented the areas of Biscarrosse and Parentis-en-Born in the Landes, as well as Bouscat, Pian-Médoc and Bordeaux-Caudéran in Gironde. It was therefore an indigenous case.

The results of the first sample had not made it possible to define, with certainty, the nature of the infection.

The dengue virus transmitted by the tiger mosquito had been suspected as well as the West-Nile, transmitted meanwhile by the Culex mosquito. To be sure, a second sample was taken on October 11, 2022 from the infected person and sent to the National Reference Center for Arboviruses in Marseille (CNR Marseille). The latter confirmed, on November 4, that it was a Usutu virus infection.

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Usutu virus (USUV) is an emerging virus of African origin, of the genus Flavivirus and of the family Flaviviridae. It is part of the Japanese encephalitis complex. It was identified for the first time in South Africa, in Swaziland in 1959, on the edge of the Usutu river, and reported in birds in Tuscany in Italy in 1996, then in Hungary, in Switzerland, in Spain and in Germany. In France, monitoring of this virus in birds is carried out by the French Office for Biodiversity.

In Europe, the first human cases of USUVU were detected in northern Italy in 2009 in immunocompromised patients.