filovirus
tsmith | September 27, 2016The 2013-2016 West African Ebola virus outbreak altered our perception of just what an Ebola outbreak could look like.
While none of the three primary affected countries--Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea-have had a case since April 2016, the outbreak resulted in a total of over 28,000 cases of Ebola virus disease (EVD)--65 times higher than the previous largest EVD outbreak, and more than 15 times the total number of cases of all prior EVD outbreaks combined, from the virus's discovery in 1976 to a concurrent (but unrelated) outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2014.
In March 2016…
tsmith | August 18, 2012August, 1976. A new infection was causing panic in Zaire. Hospitals became death zones, as both patients and medical staff succumbed to the disease. Reports of nightmarish symptoms trickled in to scientists in Europe and the US, who sent investigators to determine the cause and stem the epidemic. Concurrently, they would find out, the same thing was happening hundreds of miles to the north in Sudan. In all, 284 would be infected in that country, and another 358 in Zaire--over 600 cases (and almost 500 deaths) due to a mysterious new disease in just a few months' time.
The new agent was Ebola…
tsmith | May 16, 2011Via H5N1 and other sources, there's at least one new Ebola case in Uganda:
The rare and deadly Ebola virus has killed a 12-year-old Ugandan girl and health officials said on Saturday they expected more cases.
The girl from Luwero district, 75 km (45 miles) north of the capital Kampala, died on May 6, said Anthony Mbonye, the government's commissioner for community health, in the first outbreak of the virus in Uganda in four years.
"Laboratory investigations have confirmed Ebola to be the primary cause of the illness and death. So there is one case reported but we expect other…
sa smith | July 29, 2010Ummmmmmm...
Hmmm...
Filoviruses are ancient and integrated into mammalian genomes
Hmmmmmm...
Unexpected Inheritance: Multiple Integrations of Ancient Bornavirus and Ebolavirus/Marburgvirus Sequences in Vertebrate Genomes--
This first comprehensive study of its kind demonstrates that the sources of genetic inheritance in vertebrate genomes are considerably more diverse than previously appreciated.
No... no... PLOS received this paper first, but BMC Evolutionary Biology published their paper first... so... no...
Its still neat, but... :-/
sa smith | July 8, 2010One of the scary things about filoviruses (eg Ebola, Marburg)... is that we dont know where they comes from. We know how polio is transmitted. We know how HIV-1 is transmitted. We know how influenza is transmitted. We know how rabies is transmitted.
Even if you dont have good vaccines or good therapies, if you know where a virus comes from or how it is transmitted, you can take steps to prevent illness.
But filoviruses....?
One hypothesis is that small mammals are the natural reservoir. A way to look for that would be to study the immunology of lots of small mammals-- Do they have…
mpendergrast | June 21, 2010Mark Pendergrast writes: To kick off this book club discussion of Inside the Outbreaks, I thought I would explain briefly how I came to write the book and then suggest some possible topics for discussion.
The origin of the book goes back to an email I got in 2004 from my old high school and college friend, Andy Vernon, who wrote that I should consider writing the history of the EIS. I emailed back to say that I was honored, but what was the EIS? I had never heard of it. I knew Andy worked on tuberculosis at the CDC, but I didn't know that he had been a state-based EIS officer from 1978…