Various viruses
tsmith | July 27, 2006Somehow I missed this story in the June issue of Science:
...Jeffery Taubenberger of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP) in Washington, D.C., said that RNA found in tissue samples from pneumonia patients who died in 1915 shows that the virus's hemagglutinin--an all-important coat protein--is a subtype called H3. If confirmed, "that's tremendously exciting," says molecular biologist Ian Wilson of the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, California. Knowing the virus's entire genetic makeup--which Taubenberger believes is possible--would shed fresh light on where the 1918 killer…
tsmith | July 25, 2006 I've mentioned previously the potential role that mild or asymptomatic infections with influenza may play in transmission and evolution of the virus. Right now, most of our reports of H5N1 have been due to serious infections that caused a patient to seek medical care. These cases are the tip of the iceberg in a normal influenza outbreak, when most of us don't have physician-diagnosed influenza. Instead, we recognize the signs and symptoms, and stay at home to ride it out. Is this happening in Indonesia, Thailand, and elsewhere? For every person who shows symptoms of H5N1 infection, are…
tsmith | July 19, 2006Check out the best science blogging from the past two weeks over at Salto sobrius. Included in the current carnival is a site that's new to me, VirologyBytes, and in particular this post (well, podcast) discussing just what a virus is. Unfortunately, I'm at a computer without speakers at the moment, so I'll have to check it out later, but the site looks quite interesting.
tsmith | July 18, 2006 I've mentioned previously the role, or potential role, that bats play in disease transmission. They have long been suspected, and recently identified, as hosts for the Ebola virus. (Whether they're the main reservoir species and what--if any--role they play in transmission of the virus to humans remains to be determined). They've also been implicated in the emergence of SARS and Nipah virus, and of course, have long been associated with the maintenance of rabies virus. A new paper reviews the role of bats in the maintenance and emergence of novel viruses.
Bats represent a huge portion…
tsmith | July 15, 2006More interesting stories that I didn't get to this week...
Ewen is looking for volunteer producers for his radio show. If you're in his neck of the woods and would like to learn about science journalism, drop him a line.
Mike notes that MRSA is winning the war on drugs, due in part to dirty needles and a lack of needle exchange programs.
Orac discusses the latest Geiers drama (those would be the folks who've been most prominent in pushing the vaccination/autism link here in the U.S.) Turns out a court recently laid the smackdown on them, Kitzmiller-style.
More sequence information has been…
tsmith | July 13, 2006Here in the U.S., we've not found any high pathogenicity H5N1 influenza viruses, be it in our wild waterfowl, our domestic poultry, or our human population. But a recent story shows how quickly (and quietly) it could enter our country:
Officials investigate poultry from Troy warehouse
Michigan agriculture officials said Wednesday they have found no evidence of contaminated food in their investigation of frozen poultry that originated from China, where bird flu has been reported in some areas.
Some of the poultry found in a Troy warehouse has been seized and destroyed in the past few weeks…
tsmith | July 11, 2006 Longtime readers know of my fascination with Ebola. Much of it is fueled not by the fact that it's a major killer of humanity, because it's not: in 30 years, it's been responsible for a bit less than 2,000 human infections, and ~1,200 deaths. Bats have long been suspected to be a reservoir of the virus, and recent studies have confirmed that they can carry the virus.
With at least one strain of Ebola (Ebola Reston), we know that our primate cousins are more severely affected than we are. This strain has been found to infect captured primates brought into the United States from the…
tsmith | July 10, 2006Ames, Iowa may not exactly be thought of as a major tourist destination, or sporting venue. Last week, however, it was both, as the host of the first ever Special Olympics USA National Games, with Ames serving as an "olympic village." Most of it went off rather smoothly, but it also became newsworthy for another reason:
Illness identified at Special Olympics
Several people affiliated with Special Olympics teams who fell ill this week have tested positive for norovirus, a common cause of what is known as the stomach flu, state health officials announced Saturday.
Overall, 52 people…
tsmith | July 7, 2006Those of you who have followed creationism/intelligent design literature over the years have probably felt as if you're living in an alternate universe sometimes. In that literature, many times it seems as if "up" means "down" and "highly supported by the evidence" means "a theory in crisis."
You may not have been following the comments to this thread on AIDS (and lord, I can't blame you), but if you have been, you've seen a similar phenomenon, where it's suggested that mutations found in RNA viruses are just due to sloppy lab work, essentially blowing off an entire field of research.…
tsmith | July 1, 2006More interesting topics, too little time...
Mike discusses the dearth of qualified people to work in clinical microbiology labs--and the effect it may have on your health.
I'm a wanna-be history nerd. I really enjoy the topic, but as a science major, I didn't have a lot of time to take formal coursework in college, and since then much of my reading has focused on historical issues that are somehow related to science or medicine. So, there's a new blog to update me on all the other cool history news.
I've had several posts on butterflies and moths this week. It's also a theme at…
tsmith | June 30, 2006 One of the things I love about science--but that can also be frustrating--is that every new piece of information leads to a new unanswered question. We've learned so much about microbiology and human disease since the time of Koch and Pasteur, but in many other ways, we're still at square one. One reason is because research over the last century has largely focused on disease-causing organisms--and within those, many studies have focused on identifying factors that allow these organisms to cause disease. This concentration has led to many breakthroughs (such as vaccine targets), but it…
tsmith | June 28, 2006 Especially in religious circles, much has been made about the "uselessness" of condoms for the prevention of infection with the human papilloma virus (HPV). This is the virus that is responsible for almost all cases of cervical cancer, against which a new vaccine was recently approved (for more background, see this post). Approximately 20 million Americans are currently infected with HPV, and over their lifetime, about half of sexually active adults will be infected at one point. Though most strains of the virus are harmless, a small portion of them cause cervical cancer in women, a…
tsmith | June 28, 2006One of the things that faculty get to do is go to lots and lots and lots of meetings. Today I'm at a 6-hour retreat focused on distance learning, PubMed, and data repositories. (I know, you're all seething with jealousy). I hope to have another post up later this afternoon if I can get to it; in the meanwhile, here are a few notable posts from elsewhere:
Revere at Effect Measure has an overview of H5N1 over the last 6 months, and discusses why SARS and West Nile aren't "false alarms."
Coturnix brings you a potpourri of science news. He also has a DonorsChoose update--check out how…
tsmith | June 23, 2006Rebecca over at Memoirs of a Skepchick makes an excellent argument against the new HPV vaccine:
Before the invention of the fire extinguisher in 1816, people used sensible fire safety precautions. They did not leave oily rags piled in buckets next to the ashtray. They did not set their farts on fire. And they always kept their curtains far away from heating devices.
After the invention of the fire extinguisher, all hell broke loose. It didn't take long for games such as "Tie a Lit Sparkler to the Cat" and "Flaming Monopoly" to explode -- literally and metaphorically -- in popularity all over…
tsmith | June 19, 2006[From the archives; originally posted November 28, 2005]
Have you ever wondered how Kevin Bacon and the lights of fireflies related to malaria and power grids? I know it's something that's kept me up many a sleepless night. One word: interconnections.
Many of you have probably heard of the "Six degrees of Kevin Bacon"game. This is based on the work of Stanley Milgram beginning in the 1960s, and brought up again more recently in a 1998 Nature paper, "Collective Dynamics of 'Small-World' Networks," by mathematicians Watts and Strogatz. Milgram conducted a number of studies using his "lost…
tsmith | June 16, 2006[From the archives; originally posted October 20, 2005]
Measles is one of those diseases that we don't give much thought to in the United States anymore. Following an incubation period of about 10 days, flu-like symptoms appear: fever, malaise, cough, congestion, conjunctivitis. Soon, the rash appears, first near the ears, then the forehead, the face, and over the rest of the body. Complications were common. These could include a seconary bacterial pneumonia, encephalitis, myocarditis, miscarriage, and a condition called subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE).
(Continued below...)
SSPE…
tsmith | June 16, 2006Welcome to the June edition of Animalcules! Apologies for the lateness; I only had a few minutes to get online yesterday, and that was mainly devoted to checking email and making sure there were no crises that needed my attention. So, without further ado...
From the Scientific Creative Quarterly comes a humorous entry: Prokaryotes of America Unite. Almost makes me feel bad. (You also may want to check out Scientific Creative Quarterly editor David Ng's new blog here at Scienceblogs: The World's Fair.
Jennifer over at Science Matters has a nice post discussing background information on…
tsmith | June 11, 2006Like a Saturday roundup, but a day delayed. Some other topics I found interesting this week, but didn't have a chance to elaborate on...
Afarensis mentions new research on the evolution of the Crenarchaeota, a group of archae.
Laura Bush speaks on the President's malaria initiative.
Both Ed and Janet muse on the FDA approval of the new HPV vaccine--and ramifications thereof.
Via Eastern blot, 2006's Art of Science winners.
Wanna work at Seed? They're looking for fall interns; deadline is July 6th.
And of course, don't forget to send in your submissions for this week's Animalcules…
tsmith | June 9, 2006I wrote recently how evolution and phylogenetic analysis of HIV isolates has provided evidence that the progenitor to HIV jumped into humans in Cameroon or a nearby area. Obviously it's a topic that's interesting to me, but may seem a bit esoteric to some. RPM over at Evolgen has a new post showing another application of phylogenetic analysis to HIV that may be of interest to readers here, where infectious disease epidemiology meets CSI.
tsmith | June 9, 2006The new issue of Nature Medicine has a number of excellent articles on topics in infectious disease. I'm going to discuss a few of them in more detail next week (or possibly the week after; next week will be a short one for me), but in the meantime, I'll highlight two articles in particular that may interest readers: Here on the midwest mumps outbreak, and this story on phage therapy to treat "superbug" infections. (It just happens to be written by Thomas Häusler, who is the author of the book I reviewed in this post.