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The mimivirus – don’t be fooled by the name!
A badly named virus if ever there was one… because there’s nothing small and sweet about the mimivirus. In fact it’s one of the largest viruses ever identified. And according to a team at the French National Scientific Research Centre, it seems that the mimivirus could be responsible for pneumonia.
Far from being as cute as its name would suggest, the mimivirus behaves like a dangerous “squatter”, infecting the body’s macrophages – the cells involved in the elimination of pathogens. But it doesn’t stop there. It continues its offensive, multiplying inside the macrophages themselves. This mechanism, already known to be true of bacteria, had never before been shown to apply to a virus.
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8 article(s)
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