Severe fever with thrombocytopenia syndrome (SFTS) treated with a novel antiviral medication, favipiravir (T-705)

Background

Severe fever and thrombocytopenia syndrome (SFTS) is an acute illness with a high mortality (16.2–29.1%). Unfortunately, there is no specific cure or vaccine for SFTS.

Methods

In this open-label study, two patients with SFTS were treated with favipiravir, a new antiviral drug.

Results

Patients had a sustainable virologic, immunologic and symptomatic recovery.

Conclusions

Favipiravir may be a prosiming drug for the treatment of SFTS.

Electronic supplementary material

The online version of this article (10.1007/s15010-019-01364-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

A pediatric case of severe fever with thrombocytopenia syndrome in Zhejiang Province, China

This report describes a pediatric case of severe fever with thrombocytopenia syndrome (SFTS), which is an emerging disease that is caused by a novel bunyavirus. Interestingly, the previously reported SFTS cases typically involved elderly patients, while our case involved a 5-year-old child from Zhejiang Province, China. In this report, we describe our investigation of the clinical and epidemiological characteristics of this case, to improve our understanding of this emerging disease. Our principle finding was that the present case's clinical symptoms were milder than those that have been reported in adult cases of SFTS. Therefore, we recommend more careful screening of pediatric patients who present with mild symptoms that are consistent with SFTS.