Abstract
A large and complex outbreak of hepatitis C virus in Valencia, Spain that began 25 years ago led to the prosecution and conviction of an anesthetist who was accused of infecting hundreds of his patients. Evolutionary analyses of viral gene sequences were presented as evidence in the trial, and these are now described in detail by González-Candelas and colleagues in a paper published in BMC Biology. Their study illustrates the challenges and opportunities that arise from the use of phylogenetic inference in criminal trials concerning virus transmission.See research article: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7007/11/76
Highlights
A large and complex outbreak of hepatitis C virus in Valencia, Spain that began 25 years ago led to the prosecution and conviction of an anesthetist who was accused of infecting hundreds of his patients
During the past 20 years molecular phylogenetics has become increasingly popular as a tool for the forensic investigation of viral transmission, where it is used to infer the ancestral relationships of infections from sampled viral genome sequences
Like human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), hepatitis C virus (HCV) is a globally prevalent, blood-borne and rapidly evolving virus, yet it is unusual for its transmission to be evaluated scientifically in a criminal court
Summary
A large and complex outbreak of hepatitis C virus in Valencia, Spain that began 25 years ago led to the prosecution and conviction of an anesthetist who was accused of infecting hundreds of his patients. One of the difficulties in analyzing the transmission of very fast-evolving viruses such as HIV and HCV is that the genomes of strains sampled from individuals who are known without doubt to have infected each other are rarely identical.
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