Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

For many women pregnancy represents a special and gratifying period in their lives. However, complications during pregnancy can put both the mother and child at risk of illness or even death. One such complication is viral infection. Genital herpes (herpes simplex virus type 2; HSV-2) is the most common sexually transmitted infection in adult women affecting 267 million women worldwide. In Canada, 17% of pregnant women are positive for HSV-2. This is an issue of great concern since HSV-2 infection in pregnancy is shown to increase the risk of miscarriage, fetal growth restriction, preterm labour, and developmental abnormalities, but little is known about how HSV-2 infection causes these complications. What is known is that female sex hormones, which are high during pregnancy, allow the virus to act more destructively than it would in a non-pregnant woman. In this proposal we plan to use a mouse model of HSV-2 infection to examine how HSV-2 infection impacts maternal/fetal health and pregnancy outcomes. We hope that the results from this project will help develop better prevention and treatment strategies to improve pregnancy outcomes for both mother and child.