viruses
mikethemadbiologist | January 17, 2007There's an interesting article about the norovirus outbreak in Boston (it also seems to be nationwide). At this point, over half a percent of all the residents of Boston have gone to the emergency room due to this virus--which means even more have been sick.
First, as always, wash your damn hands! Now, onto the public health. What's interesting is that Massachusetts has installed a real-time surveillance system to deal with bioterrorism and biopreparedness (i.e., avian flu--got that, Fumento?). But as the biosecurity 'community'* is beginning to learn, you can't separate biosecurity from…
mikethemadbiologist | January 2, 2007So Michael Fumento has issued a challenge to put 'odds' on avian influenza, thinking that somehow I've stated that an avian influenza pandemic is likely (he's also accused me, a scientist, of being "anti-scientist" and "alarmist"). Well, I'm not putting odds down because I've never said that a pandemic is likely. Then again, one should hardly be surprised when a professional conservative completely distorts what one says.
In fact, in the post, I wrote:
We can argue about public health priorities (avian flu isn't my top priority personally).
One would think that was clear, but I made the…
mikethemadbiologist | January 1, 2007From the archives, here's another post about influenza.
...you knew that starting in late September or early October there would be a series of bioterrorist attacks, and that these attacks would kill anywhere from 30,000 - 50,000 U.S. citizens. Now imagine that you could produce a vaccine that would be, at worst partially effective, and at best, completely effective, particularly if enough of the U.S. population were vaccinated. Imagine that, with enough vaccination, thousands of lives could be saved. A competent government, one that could do a heckuva job, would do something, wouldn't it…
mikethemadbiologist | December 31, 2006I've been called out by Michael Fumento regarding a post about avian influenza. While I'm putting that together, I thought it would be a good opportunity to revisit some previous posts about influenza. From the old site:
A think tank in Australia released a report claiming that an influenza pandemic might kill over 140 million people. So, after spending most of my professional career examining the evolution of infectious disease, I think...I don't have any idea if a pandemic influenza strain will evolve. Ultimately, we're trying to anticipate a unique historically contingent event:…
mikethemadbiologist | December 16, 2006In the past week, over 400 students and teachers in the Boston area have contracted norovirus, which causes nausea, vomitting and diarrhea:
"In close settings like a school or a nursing home or a family, the failure to adequately follow good hygiene will manifest itself with spread of this type of disease," said Dr. Bela Matyas of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health.
At Simmons, the outbreak traveled swiftly, although it was not concentrated in any single location, said Dr. Kay Petersen , medical director of the college's health center. To stem the spread, e-mails were sent to…
mikethemadbiologist | December 10, 2006Biologist Esther Lederberg died recently--unfortunately, it wasn't very well covered (the NY Times was only a month late...). This is a real shame, since I don't think the history of molecular biology would have been the same without her.
While many people are familiar with, or at least have heard of her ex-husband, Joshua Lederberg, Esther Lederberg made seminal discoveries about the prophage Lambda. Lambda is a virus (or 'bacteriophage') that infects bacteria. Lambda can behave lytically--it injects its DNA into the bacterial cell, hijacks the cellular machinery to produce more virus,…
sporte | December 7, 2006Five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor (dubbed the Tripoli six) may be executed soon by the Libyan government for the crime of deliberately infecting over 400 children with HIV. If they did infect the children, this would be a horrendous crime. If they did not infect the children, it's the Libyan government that will be killing innocent people.
The clock is ticking.
Some of you might be wondering (I know I was): How exactly is molecular sequence data being used to solve the crime? Why are scientists and science bloggers claiming that the Tripoli six are innocent?
Let's begin by…
sporte | November 22, 2006Random remembrance #1. December 1st is world AIDS day. On December 1st, I will mourn for my former colleagues, students and acquaintances who've died from AIDS.
Random random reminder #2. Bloggers, Ron Hudson from the International Carnival of Pozivities will be putting together stories about AIDS and HIV. The next carnival isn't until Dec. 10th, but you can still submit.
Random blog comment #3: After the last International Carnival of Pozivities, I had a very odd comment on my article.
One commenter wrote:
Uhhhhh. Can you name a society that doesn't acknowledge that STD's spread…
mikethemadbiologist | November 5, 2006There is absolutely nothing the Republicans won't politicize. Now, they have launched the War on Vaccination. For a decade, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a foundation dedicated to improving public health, particularly among the poor and the elderly, has funded a "Vote and Vax" program at early voting facilities that serve poor neighborhoods in 24 cities. Basically, if you're over 50, you can get a vaccination at the polling location.
Thursday, in Houston, the Republicans filed a lawsuit to stop this program.
Nevermind that the program has been running for ten years. When the program…
mikethemadbiologist | November 1, 2006There's a very interesting article by Sheldon Campbell and Roger Klein in the October edition of The Journal of Clinical Microbiology about the pros and cons of home-testing for HIV. At first glance, this would only seem to be a good thing: after all, we use home pregnancy testing kits, so why not an HIV kit?
Well, like everything, there is good and bad. First, the potential bad outcomes:
(italics mine)
In the worst case, a rapid HIV test would be approved, but the real-world accuracy in the hands of intended users would be less than intended. The test would be expensive and heavily and…
mikethemadbiologist | October 12, 2006
(from here)
Revere recently had an excellent post about why you should get a flu shot. Let me just add one more reason: the best way to avoid contracting influenza is to be around people who don't have it. While this sounds like something Yogi Berra might say, containing influenza is a group effort. This is a very serious public health problem: the 'ordinary' flu 'only' kills 37,000 people per year. That's right: for every person in the U.S. who dies from AIDS, there are two who die from influenza.
And getting enough people vaccinated, particularly those aged 5-18, could cut the number…
mikethemadbiologist | October 3, 2006Inspired by this excellent post by Revere about the evolution of influenza, I've delved deep into the archives of the Mad Biologist, and summoned up some evolutionary thoughts of my own about influenza:
I meant to post something about evolution and influenza before my travels up north, but I was swamped by work and couldn't get to it. Thankfully, two colleagues, Carl Bergstrom and Marc Lipsitch, have decided to deal with Wendy Orent's faith-based virology. Orent writes (italics mine):
Indeed, a strictly enforced quarantine could do more harm than good. Herding large numbers of possibly…
mikethemadbiologist | September 30, 2006Since I'm going away for a long weekend, I'll leave you with this post about phage therapy from the archives.
So Aetiology, in her new digs, wants a post. Well, here's one, inspired by a comment: phage therapy. "Phage therapy" is short for bacteriophage therapy. Bacteriophage are viruses that kill bacteria (literally, "bacteria devourers"). The basic concept of phage therapy is to introduce the phage into an infected patient. The phage infect the bacterium-an infection of an infection! Then the phage multiply within the bacterium, lyse (explode from the inside) the host bacterium and…
mikethemadbiologist | September 25, 2006Most microbiologists, you know, the experts , are not very thrilled with the emphasis being placed on bioterrorism. Inspired by Tara's post on the Bioshield initiative, I'm reposting this from the old site.
This week, leading microbiologists are sending an open letter to NIH stating that the politically-based emphasis on bioterrorism is starving other areas of research. For some time now, I've thought that we've been too concerned with bioterrorism, particularly when good ol' influenza regularly kills 32,000 37,000 people per year (that's one World Trade Center per month for those of you…
mikethemadbiologist | September 15, 2006From Kristine at Amused Muse:
People are always pointing at scientists and screaming, "Why don't you find a cure for cancer?" Well, now that scientists finally have, loopy-loo fundies deny the treatment for their daughters! Screw them. Not only should this vaccination be required for all young girls, any parent who seriously thinks that this "encourages immorality" should have his or her children taken away. They aren't fit to be parents.
Pregnancy as punishment, cancer as coercion. Welcome to Bush's America.
sporte | August 23, 2006Did HIV become resistant to Atazanavir because of a genetic change?
Was that genetic change inherited?
Did HIV evolve?
Can we explain why genetic changes at specific sites might help HIV escape the effects of the drug?
Let's find out.
All of the sequences in the image below (except for the first) come from HIV strains that were isolated from patients who took Atazanavir and no other protease inhibitors. All of the strains of HIV from patients were resistant to the drug.
If an amino acid is different from other strains, the color at that position is changed. Since we see different…
sporte | August 21, 2006In which we see the results and come to our own conclusions.
If you want to let other people tell you what's right and what's wrong, they will surely do so. Turn on the TV and hordes of happy actors bounce around, only too happy to help you purchase the right deodorant. Open your e-mail and everyone wants to share the best on-line pharmacy and investment guide.
Ugh.
I prefer making my own decisions, thank you very much.
So, I want to give you a chance to look at the data and decide for yourself, if the data show HIV protease sequences changing over time.
Let's see the results.
We're…
sporte | August 19, 2006Let the experiment begin.
We're experimenting with HIV in this series. And yes, you can try this at home!
If you want to see where we've been and get an idea where we're going, here are the links.
Part I. Meet HIV and learn how we're going to use it look at evolution. An introduction to the experiment and a link to a short flash movie on HIV.
Part II. Instructions for doing the experiment.
Part III. Look at the sequence results.
Part IV. Look at protein structures and see if we can explain why the experiment worked the way it did.
Let's move onward.
1. I made a data set of amino acids…
sporte | August 14, 2006But that hasn't always been true.
When I was in college, I had part-time jobs drawing blood from patients in the university hospital and as a phlebotomist at local plasma center. Plus, I was a volunteer EMT on an ambulance crew. Needless to say, I saw plenty of blood.
And those were the days when no one wore gloves. We used to be tested every few months for hepatitis, since it was pretty common for the hospital lab techs to get that, so I did worry about hepatitis.
When I went to graduate school, and realized that the hospital where I had worked, had been treating some of the first…
mikethemadbiologist | July 17, 2006The carnival o'the wee beasties known as Animalcules is up at Science Matters. I have a post about MRSA and drug use in this edition. There's also a good post about drug resistance in the HIV virus.
While I'm advertising things microbial, revere at Effect Measure has a good post on patenting microbes and other organisms. He's right: it's stupid.