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Murray Valley encephalitis is spread by the bite of an infected mosquito, while mostly asymptomatic it can cause swelling of the brain in approximately 1 in 500 people, which can lead to brain damage or death, however in most cases the disease clears on its own.

Also carried by mosquitoes, West Nile virus may cause no symptoms, or a flu-like illness but in rare cases it can lead to serious complications such as meningitis and encephalitis.

The difficulty in traditional testing for Murray Valley encephalitis or West Nile virus is that most labs think the blood needs to be spun, which only detects virus in the first five to seven days after becoming ill from being bitten by the mosquito.

“What we found is when you test urine and whole blood, instead of being limited to the five to seven days, we see five to 11 fold increase in the amount of time we can detect virus. In one patient, it was 11 weeks,” Dr Leon Caly, Senior Medical Scientist at the Victorian Infectious Diseases Laboratory at the Doherty Institute said.

This gives doctors a much longer timeframe in which they may get answers when investigating these infections.

“While we don’t have any evidence to suggest this, we believe the virus binds to red blood cells somehow, so when labs spin it before it being tested, they are spinning out the virus.”

Dr Caly said it’s important for clinicians to not just rely on the traditional serum tests given this new information.

“Particularly when collecting urine isn’t invasive. In addition to helping with diagnosis, detecting live virus in urine has implications for infection control in hospitals, it needs to be disposed of safely,” he said.