This book is intended for trainee doctors, healthcare scientists, infection control nurses and other healthcare workers working in infection-related specialties (virology, microbiology, infectious diseases and public health).

It will also be useful for medical students and other healthcare professionals (doctors, nurses, general practitioners etc.) working in non-infection specialties who deal with patients with suspected virus infections.

It has easily accessible information with tables, figures and algorithms to aid easy reference for the busy clinician. It is divided into two main sections. The first is an alphabetically arranged series of chapters on the most important viruses that cause symptomatic disease in humans in the developed world; we have kept a standard chapter format throughout this section to enable the reader to access important information quickly. The second is a set of clinical syndromes (e.g. hepatitis and skin rashes), where the different viruses and their clinical symptoms are presented. Other sections provide information on diagnostic techniques, antiviral drugs, viral vaccines, occupational health issues, infection control and travel-related infections. We are aware that most virologists in the UK deal with non-viral pathogens, such as Chlamydia, toxoplasma, atypical pneumonia organisms and Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (CJD) and variant CJD (vCJD), so a section on these pathogens is also included.

The aim of the book is for it to be a quick-reference guide to differential diagnosis, giving details of which specimens and tests are best for laboratory diagnosis, which treatments to use and what the control of infection implications are.