revere | November 2, 2006Contrary to expectation, the trial of the five Bulgarian nurses and one Palestinian doctor for capital crimes in a Libyan court did not conclude yesterday but was continued until November 4 to allow the prosecutors to answer arguments by the defense that Libyan authorities have framed the Tripoli Six. Meanwhile in a significant development over one hundred Nobel Laureates have sent a letter to Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi of Libya protesting the exclusion of scientific evidence potentially exonerating the defendants. From Declan Butler's blog:
In the letter, to be published online this week by…
revere | November 2, 2006[This is the last post in a series about viral and cell surface glycoproteins and their role in the influenza story. It's a slightly updated series from the archives on the old site. Links to all four posts: part I, part II, part III, part IV]
In the first three posts of this series we have given an overview of what the cell surface looks like to the influenza virus and set out the ideas and vocabulary virologists use to discuss the sugar molecules on the cell's surface the virus hooks on to, the viral receptor. The many possible configurations of sugars on a cell's surface serve important…
revere | November 1, 2006The Chinese news agency Xinhua reported last week that scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology found H5N1 in the feces of sparrow, non-migratory urban birds two years ago (via Reuters). The brief news report only says the discovery followed an outbreak among poultry in nearby Henan province. It's not clear what took so long to report this or whether the H5N1 strain in sparrows differs from that in poultry.
Is this good or bad for public health?
It's hard to think of ways it could be good for public health to have another endemic source of a virus potentially capable of infecting humans…
revere | November 1, 2006[This is the third in a reprise from the archives about some of the science of the influenza virus. Links to all four posts: part I, part II, part III, part IV]
An influenza virus does only one thing: tries to make many copies of itself. And it does it poorly, although prolifically. Instead of making exact copies it is liable to make inexact copies and this is one of the sources of genetic variation which produces the parallel "random experiments" characteristic of viral replication. Lots of the copies it makes are fine, but many are fatally flawed, and also many that are more or less…
revere | October 31, 2006Another vaccine "story" makes the wires, this time from Dynavax, a Berkeley biotech company. The story is pretty typical of the genre:
Drug companies typically design their seasonal flu vaccines to generate antibodies that neutralize two proteins, hemagglutinin and neuraminidase, on flu viruses. But because these two proteins are prone to mutate, new vaccines tailored to their changing characteristics usually have to be made every year.
That variability could prove devastating if the bird-flu virus suddenly mutates into a form that spreads quickly among people instead of just birds. By the…
revere | October 31, 2006[This is the second installment from the archives of a series of posts giving some scientific background on the influenza virus, in this case the terminology basics on viral receptors. Technical but not beyond the range of most well educated readers. Links to all four posts: part I, part II, part III, part IV]
In the last post we discussed the dense canopy of sugars linked to cell surface proteins that covers most cells. This outer fur-like sugar surface is called the glycocalyx and plays an important biological role, including cell-cell recognition and communication, interacting with and…
revere | October 30, 2006It sounds reasonable at first. If hospitals and clinics are going to be overwhelmed in a flu pandemic, prepare to care for sick family members at home.
But what if there's no one to care for you at home? That's the position of the one in four Americans who live alone. Even for those that have others to care for them there are serious barriers:
Almost half of those surveyed said they would run into financial problems or might run out of important drugs if health officials asked them to stay home for a week or more, said Robert Blendon, a Harvard School of Public Health policy expert who will…
revere | October 30, 2006[Back in January we did a series of posts on the old site giving some background science on the influenza virus for the general reader. The Reveres are traveling (for a change) and so we thought it was an appropriate time to dig around in the old archives and update some of the posts thought useful by readers. Here's the first installment of a set of posts on cell surface and HA protein of the influenza virus and where they fit in the picture. Links to all four posts: part I, part II, part III, part IV]
Avian influenza, as its name suggests, is a disease of birds. Most aquatic waterfowl…
revere | October 29, 2006The US midterm elections have a nasty side, but so does another, less visible election, that for Director General of the World Health Organization. Thirteen candidates are vying for the position left vacant by the untimely death of Lee Jong-Wook in May. And the politicking is said to be fierce.
One visible evidence is a new campaign against the Mexican candidate, Julio Frenk. Frenk is a well-regarded public health advocate for the poor who has been endorsed by the editor of The Lancet, the noted British medical journal (other posts on the election here and here). At issue is the role Frenk…
revere | October 29, 2006Atheism is certainly a phenomenon in the book market. I can't remember when books about godlessness made so much news and sold so well, although of course I wasn't around when The Great Agnostic Robert Green Ingersoll lectured to huge audiences in the late nineteenth century. Whatever. I'm happy to have the likes of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett making strong intellectual arguments for atheism.
The popularity of these books is sometimes ascribed to a backlash against the forced intrusion of religion into American political life in the regime of George Bush. Whatever the…
revere | October 28, 2006I'm guessing few of you have heard of the physician, Robert Mayer. After all, he lived more than 150 years ago. Yet he is a discoverer of one of Nature's great laws, the First Law of Thermodynamics (otherwise known as Conservation of Energy). A strange topic for this site? My attention was drawn to it upon reading of the circumstances which prompted his discovery.
In February of 1840, newly graduated he sailed as the doctor aboard the Dutch merchant ship Java enroute to Indonesia. During his enforced leisure aboard ship he studied physiology. Three months after setting off from Rotterdam he…
revere | October 27, 2006"First they came for the Socialists, and I didn't speak up, because I wasn't a Socialist... Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up, because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak up for me." (Martin Niemoller)
The trial of the Tripoli Six is set to conclude on Tuesday, October 31, but already extraordinary events are taking place in the world of high status science.
Yesterday we posted on the letter of protest published in Science from 45 top scientists. The journals Science and Nature are arguably the two most prestigious scientific publications…
revere | October 27, 2006A letter from Philip Mortimer of the UK's Health Protection Agency to the CDC journal, Emerging Infectious Diseases, calls attention to an apparent increased risk for death from influenza among a subpopulation, pregnant women. Mortimer alerts us to the fact that most (all?) national contingency plans for pandemics do not take this into account.
Mortimer cites literature from the 1918 pandemic that contains ominous figures:
Bland reported on pregnant influenza patients in Philadelphia and elsewhere in the fall of 1918; of 337, 155 died [Bland PB. Influenza in its relation to pregnancy and…
revere | October 26, 2006A paper delivered at the annual meeting of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine is being reported to say that there is an apparent dose response relationship between cell phone and sperm counts, i.e., the more hours spent on the phone each day the lower sperm count levels.
Scientists in Cleveland, Mumbai and New Orleans tracked 364 men who were being evaluated for infertility, and split them into three groups based on sperm count. In the group whose sperm counts were within the normal range, those who used a cell phone more than four hours a day produced on average 66 million sperm…
revere | October 26, 2006When it comes to vaccinations, a high degree of safety is one of the paramount issues. This is because even a small risk, like one in a million, when multiplied by tens of millions will produce tens or more of adverse events. The trade-off, of course, is the prevention of the disease the vaccine is directed against. Unlike a therapeutic drug, when a vaccine works, nothing happens. When there is a side effect, a previously well person becomes sick from the vaccine itself. This becomes a tricky problem in public health education. The recent scare in Israel with influenza vaccine illustrates…
revere | October 25, 2006As the October 31 date for the resumption of the trial of the Tripoli 6 looms, the world scientific community is weighing in. From the ScienceNow section of the journal Science:
U.S. scientists are adding their voices to mounting international pressure on Libya to release six foreign medical workers who could face execution within weeks. A letter published online today by Science--written by virologist Robert Gallo, director of the Institute of Human Virology in Baltimore, Maryland, and co-discoverer of HIV, and signed by 43 other scientists--accuses the Libyan government of using the medics…
revere | October 25, 2006[NB: This is a companion to today's post on the Tripoli 6]
Yesterday (October 24) was United Nations Day. Thanks to BoingBoing we were alerted that Librivox, an organization devoted to making available US Public Domain recordings, has an audiobook of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 21 languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Afrikaans, English and Esperanto.
It is almost 60 years since the UN General Assembly ratified the Declaration in the wake of Nazi atrocities before and during WWII. It was meant to clarify the UN charter on matters of human rights and to emphasize their…
revere | October 24, 2006We're getting down to it. What's the scientific basis for a lot of advice that's being given out as if its uncontroversial. Like washing hands. Or shaking hands is the way flu viruses are passed around. From Helen Branswell's usual superior reporting:
Might we all be a little healthier this cold-and-flu season if we abandoned the handshake culture? With mounting concern about a possible influenza pandemic and growing awareness of the economic costs respiratory ailments exact through absenteeism, some people are wondering precisely that. (Branswell, Canadian Press)
Makes a lot of sense.
Those…
revere | October 24, 2006An urgent communication from the World Health Organization (WHO) expresses concisely how far behind we are in being prepared for a global pandemic of influenza. Currently there are a number of vaccines under development, some of which might protect against an H5N1 virus that has become readily transmissible from person to person. But none are in production, and even if some were found adequate (not the case) and large scale production begun (far from the case), we, the world, would still be in a fix:
"We are presently several billion doses short of the amount of pandemic influenza vaccine we…
revere | October 23, 2006Helen Branswell has a story about a battle being waged among virologists and occupational health specialists regarding how influenza is spread from person to person:
Later this week virologists, infection control specialists and occupational health experts from Canada, the U.S. and Britain will gather in Toronto to start trying to answer a question that is the source of a polarized debate among them.
How does influenza spread from one person to the next in hospitals? Is it mainly transmitted by hand-to-hand contact and virus-laced droplets sneezed or coughed from the respiratory tracts of the…