Susana López Charretón is among Mexico’s leading virologists. She has been awarded the UNESCO–Carlos J. Finlay Prize for Microbiology and the L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science award. She’s the only female Mexican scientist to have edited the Journal of Virology.
Instead, it’s curiosity and a thirst for understanding and solving problems that drive her. “To me science is a way of living, something that fulfills me completely,” López Charretón says.
For four decades, she has devoted her life to studying how rotaviruses infect human cells. These double-stranded RNA viruses were described in 1973 by Australian virologist Ruth Bishop and colleagues, when those researchers discovered a virus particle present in the intestinal tissue of children with diarrhea.
Known to cause severe gastroenteritis, including acute diarrhea, vomiting, fever and dehydration, rotaviruses mainly affect babies and small children. Worldwide, the viruses are responsible for the deaths of some 100,000 or more children ages 5 and under every year.
2023-08-29 10:00:00
Article from www.sciencenews.org