Various viruses

Still playing end-of-year catch-up with grants and manuscripts so posting will be sporadic, but I'd be remiss not to mention this story regarding presidential candidate Mike Huckabee's past views on HIV/AIDS: In 1992, Huckabee wrote, "If the federal government is truly serious about doing something with the AIDS virus, we need to take steps that would isolate the carriers of this plague." "It is difficult to understand the public policy towards AIDS. It is the first time in the history of civilization in which the carriers of a genuine plague have not been isolated from the general population…

Since its discovery, only a few countries have really been affected by Ebola. The virus has surfaced multiple times in the Democractic Republic of Congo, in Sudan, in Gabon, and now in Uganda. This country was last hit (and hit hard) by Ebola in 2000, when an outbreak there caused at least 425 cases, and killed more than half of those it infected. Now it's currently causing yet another outbreak, just weeks after the outbreak in the DRC was confirmed to have ended--and the strain that's causing this one seems to be distinct from the four known types of virus we've seen to date. More after…

Revere has been covering the situation in Indonesia regarding sharing of influenza viruses with the US and other countries. For those of you who don't follow these issues, Indonesia has been the country hardest hit thus far by H5N1 (113 cases and 91 deaths as of 11/12/07). However, while one might think they would welcome outside help with diagnostics and strain typing, they've been very reluctant to share their viruses. Revere explains: But Indonesia still refuses to share its human H5N1 isolates, contending they get nothing tangible from an arrangement which is likely to lead to…

It still amazes me sometimes what viruses are capable of doing. I've written a number of times about one virus in particular, the human papilloma virus (HPV). This is the virus implicated in cervical cancer, and it also plays a role in head and neck cancers. There are a number of different strains of HPV--some of them are oncogenic (cancer-causing), while others cause more benign infections, such as warts. A related virus in rabbits also causes a type of warts, which can replicate out of control and form horny growths (indeed, this is the likely origin of the jackalope myth). Humans…

Evil Monkey has the scoop.

Two recent stories highlight the good and the bad when it comes to infectious disease prevention. The good Death rates for vaccine-preventable diseases are at an all-time low: The study, by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, and published in The Journal of the American Medical Association (link), is the first time that the agency has searched historical records going back to 1900 to compile estimates of cases, hospitalizations and deaths for all the diseases children are routinely vaccinated against. In nine of the diseases, rates of death or hospitalization…

I wrote about an emerging mosquito-borne virus with the strange name of chikungunya in a pair of posts last year. This is a virus that was first discovered more than 50 years ago, but as far as arthropod-borne viruses ("arboviruses") go, it's been a minor player for most of that time, as other arboviruses such as yellow fever, dengue, and West Nile caused more disease and death than chikungunya. However, the virus began to rapidly spread beginning in ~2004, causing around a quarter million infections on the island of La Reunion in the Indian Ocean before moving on to cause smaller…

Welcome to this month's edition of Pediatric Grand Rounds! Sit back with a cup of mulled cider and enjoy the best of the past month: Revere at Effect Measure tells the tale of Streptococcus pneumoniae serotype 19A--a serotype that's not included in the current vaccine, but has increasingly found as a cause of ear aches in children. Of course, in addition to ear infection, 'tis the season for influenza. As such, it's timely that Highlight Health, Walter emphasizes the importance of influenza vaccination. My own addition to this month's carnival touches on similar themes: how kids'…

For those of you who might not brave the comments threads on any HIV post, you may have missed this tidbit of information. I've written about "investigative journalist" Liam Scheff previously; he's an HIV "dissident" and author of a story from a few years back titled "The House that AIDS Built". In this, he claimed that HIV+ children had been removed from their parents' homes and force-fed "toxic" drugs to treat their condition (which of course, he claims is based on "inaccurate" HIV testing in the first place): The drugs being given to the children are toxic - they're known to cause…

It's only taken 30 years, but information about Ebola in nature is finally starting to snowball. First, after almost 15 years of disappearing from the human population, Ebola returned with a vengeance in the mid 1990s, causing illness in 6 separate outbreaks in Gabon, Ivory Coast, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and South Africa (imported case) between 1994 and 1996. As doctors and scientists rushed in to contain the outbreaks, they were also able to collect viral samples, and trap animals and insects in the area, searching for a reservoir for the virus. In this decade, there have been…

A few news stories hit my inbox all at once yesterday--and the combination of them doesn't bode well for childrens' health; more after the jump. First, despite several years now of banging the drum for having kids vaccinated against influenza, they're still being overlooked when it comes to pandemic planning: Children would likely be both prime spreaders and targets of a flu pandemic, but they're being overlooked in the nation's preparations for the next super-flu, pediatricians and public health advocates reported Wednesday. The report urges the government to improve planned child…

I asked yesterday what readers considered the most important diseases in history. This was prompted by a new ASM Press book, Twelve Diseases that Changed Our World, written by Irwin Sherman. As I mentioned, Sherman included many diseases readers expected--plague, cholera, tuberculosis, smallpox, syphilis, malaria, influenza, yellow fever, and AIDS. He didn't include a few that popped up repeatedly in the comments--leprosy, measles, and typhoid (or typhus, for that matter). While I think a study of these could have been illuminating (especially leprosy, since much of the stigma…

One of the organisms I work with is the group B streptococcus, Streptococcus agalactiae ("GBS"). This is a relative of the bacterium that causes strep throat. Typically, GBS causes disease in the very young and older age groups; it's one of the most common causes of meningitis in newborns, for instance. This has dropped some in recent years, as obstetricians have implemented procedures to screen expectant mothers to see if they're carrying GBS (as about a quarter of healthy adults do), and then provide antibiotics to carriers during labor (thereby preventing infection of the baby during…

Just a quick post to note that fellow ScienceBlogger Nick Anthis has up a post on HIV denial in South Africa. Though this is a topic I've touched on, he goes into a deeper history of it, including more about the cultural reasons for denial (whereas I typically focus more on the science). In other news, I have an editorial today in the The Times Higher Education Supplement in London. You can find it here (registration required).

I mentioned in this post on Marburg virus that another outbreak of hemorrhagic fever had been reported in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC, formerly Zaire). It's now been officially reported by labs in Congo and Gabon that, indeed, this new outbreak is due to the Ebola virus. More on this after the jump. As I've written previously, the DRC has been especially hard-hit by filovirus outbreaks. This was one of the places where Ebola first made its appearance in the human population, and was also the site of large outbreaks of the virus in 1995 and 2001 (with another Marburg outbreak…

September 8th was world rabies day. In the United States, this was celebrated with the news that the canine rabies strain appears to be eliminated from this country. In the U.S., rabies in both humans and domestic animals remains rare, though the virus remains endemic in several species of wildlife (especially raccoons, skunks, and bats). However, worldwide, rabies remains a significant public health problem, causing an estimated 50-60,000 deaths per year worldwide--one death every ten minutes. More after the jump... First, the news about the U.S. and dog rabies. Like most viruses,…

Denial has real consequences-- MMR plea by doctors as measles cases treble in 11 weeks: Parents have been urged to give their children the MMR vaccine as it was revealed Britain is in the middle of the worst measles outbreak for 20 years. The unprecedented warning from the Health Protection Agency came as the number of children suffering from the disease trebled over the last 11 weeks. This is the worst outbreak since the controversial MMR vaccine was introduced in 1988. Take-up of the triple jab - which also protects against mumps and rubella - plummeted to 80 per cent after Dr Andrew…

As I mentioned in the introductory post, we know incredibly little about the very basics of Marburg virus ecology and epidemiology. The sporadic nature of outbreaks of illness, their occurrence in remote areas of Africa lacking established medical research capabilities, and often in countries experiencing governmental strife and instability, compound the difficulty of determining the ecology of this particular virus. Often, the primary case (the first person in an outbreak known to be infected, and who likely acquired the virus from its wild reservoir) died before questions could be…

Those familiar with the history of influenza probably know about the 1918 outbreak of swine influenza in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. In the fall of that year, the National Swine Show and Exposition in Cedar Rapids opened, bringing people and their hogs from miles around. Soon after it opened its doors, people noticed their swine were becoming sick--and the symptoms looked suspisciously like those of human influenza. When the virus was characterized years later, it was indeed found to be the influenza virus--and it was very similar to ones that were isolated from humans. This characterization of…

As I've noted before, filoviruses are some of my favorite pathogens. I don't work on them myself--though in the pre-children era I certainly thought about it--but I find them absolutely fascinating to read about and follow the literature. Mostly, I think, this is because after knowing about them for so many years (Marburg was discovered in 1967), and so much research (over 1500 papers in Pubmed, or roughly a paper for every person these viruses have killed), we still know relatively little about the most basic questions--such as where there viruses are maintained in nature, and how they…