Various viruses
tsmith | November 10, 2006Scienceblogs' coturnix is hosting this month's edition of Carnival of Pozitivities, collecting posts on HIV/AIDS from around the blogosphere. Check it out for a number of excellent posts, including this post on HIV, senior citizens, and how politics affects HIV education.
tsmith | November 8, 2006Sometimes, I'm really, really glad that I didn't go into medicine. Via Pediatric Grand Rounds and Flea comes this story of a baby's death from herpes encephalitis. I mentioned previously that, while I work with pathogens that have been isolated from someone who had a serious infection, or even died, it's easy to just think of them as bacteria, rather than the cause of someone's death. Just studying their evolution and pathogenicity is interesting unto itself, but sometimes we need to be reminded again *why* we're studying these--and this story again is one of those reminders.
tsmith | October 24, 2006 Regular readers know an interest of mine are infections that cause more than just the typical acute spectrum of disease. For example, I've written on the role microbes might play in obesity, or the role of viruses in chronic disease such as cancer and, of course, AIDS. Still, typically, infections are thought of as acute and self-limited; that is, they infect the individual, cause illness, and are resolved in a matter of days or weeks, even though we know that this doesn't always happen. And increasingly, we're finding that infections are associated with all kinds of long-term diseases…
tsmith | October 13, 2006Flu shots are rolling out, and there should be no shortage this year. A few new articles remind the public of the importance of these vaccinations, especially in high-risk groups (something that I touched on here regarding data showing that vaccination during pregnancy can help protect the newborn).
You can find the guidelines for target vaccination groups here. Essentially, it includes anyone immunocompromised or with conditions that make them increasingly susceptible to serious complications of influenza; those 50 years of age and older; and children from 6 months to five years old.…
tsmith | October 3, 2006I write on a somewhat regular basis on here about vaccines: new research, new shots, addressing skepticism about how well they work or if they're related to autism, etc. Recently, several vaccine stories have been in the news that I've not gotten to yet, so consider this a vaccine meta-post. More after the jump.
The first story is timely in that it discusses the influenza vaccination (and we're heading into that season). Allow me to share an anecdote first. When I was pregnant with my daughter in 1999, I was in graduate school and the lab I worked in was affiliated with a hospital. So…
tsmith | October 3, 2006Orac has a post up on this new JAMA paper as well. He brings up some better examples than the one I gave:
Does anyone in this day and age still believe that smoking doesn't cause lung cancer? The epidemiological evidence of the association is bulletproof. However, the majority of smokers don't get lung cancer. In fact, there are complex statistical models that allow a pretty accurate calculation of risk in populations based on how long and how much a smoker has been smoking. For example, if you start smoking at age 18 and smoke two packs a day, by age 55, you have about a 5% chance of dying…
tsmith | October 2, 2006Ah, another day, another paper for the anti-HIV establishment to glom onto and misrepresent.
Last week's issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association published this paper examining the relationship between HIV load and CD4 T-cell decline:
Context Plasma human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) RNA level predicts HIV disease progression, but the extent to which it explains the variability in rate of CD4 cell depletion is poorly characterized.
Main Outcome Measures The extent to which presenting plasma HIV RNA level could explain the rate of model-derived yearly CD4 cell loss, as…
tsmith | September 26, 2006I was travelling over the weekend and I'm incredibly busy up through Wednesday, so new material from me will have to wait until later in the week. In the meantime, I'll point you to a stellar post I wanted to highlight last week, from Revere on H5N1 and the evolution ov virulence, and another excellent one from Mike regarding the importance of surveillance when it comes to detecting and containing outbreaks (such as the recent O157 outbreak). He also describes a timeline for how long many of the common procedures take; quite a bit different from what you get watching CSI or similar shows…
tsmith | September 18, 2006It seems like every other story that comes out about H5N1 contradicts the previous one. I've blogged previously about some reasons to think that the diagnosed cases of H5N1 are only the tip of the iceberg (see here, here, and here, for instance). Though there I present some evidence to suggest that we may be missing asymptomatic or mild influenza cases, other stories have come to the opposite conclusion. For example, a recent news story from Cambodia reports that no mild or asymptomatic cases of H5N1 infection were found:
Researchers who tested 351 Cambodian villagers after they had…
tsmith | September 14, 2006The new vaccine against the human papilloma virus is something I've discussed a time or ten here. Reaction to the vaccine by many religious groups has morphed with time, from outright resistance to a more common stance right now that they're accepting of the vaccine, but don't want it to be mandatory. Well...
Michigan legislation would require girls to get HPV vaccine
Michigan girls entering the sixth grade next year would have to be vaccinated against cervical cancer under legislation backed Tuesday by a bipartisan group of female lawmakers.
The legislation is the first of its kind in the…
tsmith | August 30, 2006 Yesterday's New York Times had an excellent story on the discovery of the human papilloma virus as the cause of cervical cancer, and ultimately, the development of a vaccine against it. It's also a good lesson in how, while solid evidence triumphs over anecdotes, even folk stories can be useful in ultimately pointing to a cause if they're rigorously investigated.
If you're curious about what all this has to do with the messed-up looking rabbit in the picture, click on through...
I've written previously about the new cervical cancer vaccine, and its potential to lessen dramatically the…
tsmith | August 26, 2006If you're interested in biology and not reading Sandra Porter's Discovering Biology in a Digital World, you should be. As she notes in her profile, her passion is "developing instructional materials for 21st century biology," and it shows--she provides all kinds of little online experiments you can run yourself, even with minimal knowledge of molecular biology. She's recently finished a 4-part series on HIV. The experiment in a nutshell, as she notes:
We are going to compare a protein sequence from a wild type, drug-sensitive, HIV virus with protein sequences from HIV samples that were…
tsmith | August 25, 2006Seed's Jacob Klein has a video up from his time at the AIDS conference last week: link. It includes short interviews with Kay and Rick Warren, evangelical Christians and founders of Saddleback Church, the grandaddy of all mega-churches. (Warren is also the author of The Purpose-Driven Life, which I've admittedly not read). It's interesting to hear their views, but as noted in this SF Gate article, there's still a lot of skepticism about their motivations and methods. (For example, while they discuss treatment and dealing the HIV, they don't pass out condoms, and their ABC's emphasize "…
tsmith | August 25, 2006Most of the stories I blog about here regarding sex (and sexually-transmitted infections) have bad news to offer. People are still poorly educated about STDs, or worse, actively misinform to try to scare people away from sex. Admittedly, good news about sexual issues are few and far between, but there actually have been a few positive stories in the news recently:
In the first article, the good news is that rates of sexual activity in teenagers have decreased a bit since 1991:
Some 46.8 percent of students said they engaged in sexual intercourse in a 2005 survey, down from 54.1 percent in…
tsmith | August 23, 2006So, you may or may not be aware of the latest "challenge" to evolutionary theory--DI Fellow Jonathan Wells' new book, "The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design." Following in the footsteps of Tom Bethell's "Politically Incorrect Guide to Science" (whose terrible chapter on AIDS I reviewed here), the book is just all shades of terrible. (As has been pointed out by many others who've read books in the "Politically Incorrect" series, they should just drop the pretense of "Politically"--simply "Incorrect" sums them up much better). I'll have a more comprehensive…
tsmith | August 22, 2006 The International AIDS conference is barely over, but already it's getting results when it comes to working against stigma and combatting denial--and is receiving help from one U.S. politician. Stories after the fold...
First, from Buisness Day comes harsh words for South Africa's leaders:
Former International AIDS Society president Mark Wainberg has launched a blistering attack on the South African government for failing to contain the country's HIV epi demic, widely acknowledged to be one of the world's worst.
Describing the government as "obtuse, dilatory and negligent" on the treatment…
tsmith | August 21, 2006I blogged previously on the potential of bacteriophage, viruses that infect--and often kill--bacteria, in treating bacterial infections that are resistant to our current antibiotics. This is an area that's really just opening up, and while there is a lot of promise, there are also a significant number of obstacles. One thing I didn't mention, however, was the potential of bacteriophage for other public health measures--such as a bacteriocidal food additive.
(More below)
A mix of bacteria-killing viruses can be safely sprayed on cold cuts, hot dogs and sausages to combat common microbes…
tsmith | August 21, 2006I've blogged several times on here about the connection between microbes and obesity (aka "infectobesity;" previous posts here, here, and here.). It's an interesting area of study, with two general directions: investigating which of our gut flora (alone or in combination with others) affect our metabolism; and how other types of infections (such as adenovirus serotype 36) can play a role in this process as well.
A recent story in the New York Times Magazine by Robin Marantz Henig provides a nice introduction to this whole area, weaving in the threads I mentioned above (as far as the…
tsmith | August 19, 2006Razib over at Gene Expression has an excellent post* about cultural issues affecting HIV and circumcision, elaborating on Lindsay's mention here of the limitations of trying to increase circumcision as a way to reduce viral spread:
There was a strong undercurrent of resistance to the approach throughout the session. It finally erupted during the question period. One man asked the panelists whether they considered circumcision a form of mutilation, and what kind of counseling or support services they would put in place to offset the traumatic effects of the surgery? When Auvert pointed out…
tsmith | August 19, 2006One catchphrase that permeated the conference this past week was "scaling up." I just want to wrap up my posting here with a brief discussion of what that is, and what that means as far as HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment.
Readers who are scientists or who have some kind of science background will probably be famililar with the concept of a "pilot study." This is a study, generally small in scale, where new ideas are tested, and preliminary data are gathered. For example, a pilot study looking at how the ABCs of prevention work may take 100 individuals and split them into two groups: 50…