Virology News

Scientists are sharply divided over how easy it might be to make a virulent form of the bird flu virus.

Really?  Anyone who actually understands just how much training it takes to do the kind of mol biol AND virus culture AND animal experiments, thinks it would be easy for amateurs to make mutant flu viruses?  Scare mongering continues...!

The Pan American Health Organization and the World Health Organization (PAHO/WHO), in collaboration with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), have published new guidelines on chikungunya, a mosquito-transmitted virus transmitted that causes fever and severe joint pain. The Guidelines for Preparedness and Response for Chikungunya Virus Introduction in the Americas aims to help countries throughout the Americas improve their ability to detect the virus and be prepared to monitor, prevent, and control the disease, should it appear.

Hundreds of people who have traveled from the Americas to Asia and Africa in the past five years have become infected with the chikungunya virus. While the virus has not spread locally in the Western Hemisphere, experts say there is a clear risk of its introduction into local mosquito populations. Local transmission could occur if mosquito populations in the United States or elsewhere in the Americas became infected with the virus and began spreading it to people in that area.

First we gave you West Nile, now chikungunya.  The Third World is spreading....

Rapper Drake struggled through a show in Texas on Friday night after falling sick with stomach flu. "The Best I Ever Had" star, who is currently on tour in the U.S., began feeling ill this week, b...

Do the Soggy Bottom rap, y'all...B-)  No respecters of persons, are viruses.

The smallpox vaccine was the first, and arguably most successful, vaccine ever put into practice, and it was scratched into the skin of individuals. With the invention of syringes and hypodermic needles, vaccination shifted toward administration directly into the muscle, under the assumption that it is better to get a vaccine straight into the body. But it turns out scientists may have had it right the first time.

HAVANA — Cuba's top biotech teams have successfully tested a new AIDS vaccine on mice, and are ready to soon begin human testing, a leading researcher told a biotechnology conference in Havana on Monday.
"The new AIDS trial vaccine already was tested successfully (on mice) and now we are preparing a very small, tightly controlled phase one clinical trial" with HIV-positive patients who are not in the advanced stages of disease, researcher Enrique Iglesias said.

Influenza activity in the northern hemisphere increased overall but has already peaked in a few countries of Europe, Northern Africa, and the Middle East. Whereas in some regions it appears to be a mild season, particularly in the United States of America (US) and the United Kingdom (UK) in other countries activity has reached levels similar to previous years.

Image: Russell Kightley Media

A new city ordinance requiring porn actors to wear condoms during filming takes effect Monday. The Los Angeles City Council approved the ordinance in January, following several high-profile instances of porn performers becoming infected by HIV.

Laura Sandys, a Conservative MP for Kent, has called for a ban on the export of UK livestock due to a recent outbreak of the Schmallenberg virus.

Sandys argues that quick action now could prevent the virus from spreading. The BBC quoted her as saying, "There is no treatment or preventative vaccine available, nor are we are clear on how the virus is being transmitted."
To date, 92 UK farms have reported cases of Schmallenberg. The virus is named after the area in Germany where early cases were first reported. Schmallenberg is thought to be spread by biting insects like ticks and mosquitoes, and experts believe the virus entered the UK via small insects that were blown with the winds across the Channel. The first cases were identified in the UK in January.

Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/320628#ixzz1oF81hPmi

UK health experts believe sun-dried tomatoes could be the cause of a recent outbreak of hepatitis A.  Four of the patients in this latest outbreak in England said they had consumed sun-dried tomatoes.  Officials are on the alert for further cases. But they say they do not know which brands of sun-dried tomatoes might be involved. This is because there is no reliable test to find the virus in food.

Welcome to the developing world, folks...B-)

Using a new culture technique developed by Claude’s Rockefeller colleague, Keith Porter, the team prepared chicken fibroblasts that were stretched thin enough to be penetrated by the microscope’s electron beam, but that were not distorted or greatly altered by the process. In 1945 the trio published a description of their technique along with the first electron micrograph of an intact cell in the Journal of Experimental Medicine

Great slideshow of early EM

The engineered bird flu virus may not be as lethal as originally reported, a conference is told.

Ron A.M. Fouchier of Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam... said the team infected six ferrets with wild virus and six with engineered virus by spraying the bug directly down their throats into their windpipes. All of the animals in both groups died. The team then sprayed an unusually high dose of each virus into the nasal passages of ferrets. Two animals that got the wild virus by this route died, but the engineered virus was fatal to only one in eight animals. The team then put ferrets infected with the engineered virus next to caged, uninfected animals. Seven animals became infected, but none died....

And round and round we go, again.  I thank Russell Kightley Media for the image.