Dengue virus disables the immune system by blocking mass transit

Proteins never get to where they need to be to start an antiviral attack. The Dengue virus comes in four distinct but related varieties called serotypes, and they’re all bad. Rather than inducing tolerance for each other, infection with one Dengue serotype actually makes people more sensitive to the other three. Victims infected by a second serotype can develop hemorrhagic fevers, which can be fatal. Somewhere around 400 million people are infected with Dengue annually—more than any other mosquito-borne ailment. There is no cure. Dengue is also in the same family as Zika and is spread by the same mosquitos, so learning more about one could have broad applications for the other. Researchers published a paper in Nature describing how the Dengue virus avoids one arm of our immune system. There are two arms to our immune system. Adaptive immunity generates antibodies and T cell receptors to combat unique aspects of a specific...