Definition: Chapare hemorrhagic fever (CHHF) is caused by Chapare virus, a single-strand RNA virus of the Arenaviridae family. Chapare virus is certainly zoonotic, or animal-borne. The limited clinical information about CHHF comes from a small, poorly described cluster of hemorrhagic fever cases in rural Bolivia. A single fatal case yielded the only clinical description and blood specimen to date.
Symptoms and Treatment: The symptoms of CHHF, as reported in the only described patient, resemble those of other South American hemorrhagic fevers, such as Argentine HF or Bolivian HF. The incubation period is unknown, but for Argentine hemorrhagic fever (AHF) is 6 to 16 days. The CHHF clinical course included: Fever, headache, articulation and muscle pain, vomiting. These symptoms were followed by deterioration with multiple hemorrhagic signs. The only described CHHF patient died 14 days after onset of symptoms. Supportive therapy is important in CHHF. This includes: maintenance of hydration, management of shock, sedation, pain relief, usual precautions for patients with bleeding disorders, transfusions. Use of convalescent plasma therapy for treatment of AHF reduces mortality significantly and anecdotal evidence shows that the antiviral drug ribavirin may also hold promise for treating AHF. Ribavirin has also been considered for preventing development of disease in people exposed to other arenaviruses.
Statistics: In United Kingdom analysis of Chapare Hemorrhagic Fever were given as recent studies have revealed several potential pathogenic mechanisms of arenaviruses, including factors that increase viral replication capacity and suppress host innate immunity, which leads to high viremia and generalized immune suppression as the hallmarks of severe and lethal arenaviral HF diseases. This review summarizes current knowledge of the roles of each of the four viral proteins and some known cellular factors in the pathogenesis of arenaviral HF as well as of some human primary cell-culture and animal models that lend themselves to studying arenavirus-induced HF disease pathogenesis