New York City Quarantines Cats to Stop Rare Bird Flu Outbreak
New York City has quarantined hundreds of cats to stop a rare bird flu outbreak before it spreads to many other cats.Read more on sciencespacerobots.com (Source: HealthNewsBlog.com)
Source: HealthNewsBlog.com - January 13, 2017 Category: Consumer Health News Tags: cats new-york-city Source Type: blogs
Crowdsourcing Citizen Scientists to Combat Zika at Texas A & M: Interview with Dr. Jenifer Horney
Infectious disease monitoring and management is not only a challenge abroad but also locally in the continental United States. At Texas A&M, Dr. Jennifer Horney PhD, MPH, CPH from the School of Public Health and Dr. Daniel Goldberg, PhD from the College of Geosciences have lead an effort to attack Zika, an Aedes mosquito-borne virus, at its source, standing water, through iOS and Android apps. The platform crowdsources data from citizen scientists about the locations of standing water that health departments can use to identify hotspots where samples can be collected to test for the presence of Zika. We had a chance ...
Source: Medgadget - December 2, 2016 Category: Medical Equipment Authors: Michael Batista Tags: Exclusive Net News Public Health Source Type: blogs
Mitochondrial DNA and the Longevity of Birds
Evidence for the relevance of mitochondrial damage to the progression of degenerative aging can be found in many places, such as when comparing species with divergent life spans and metabolic needs. Birds and bats have significantly higher metabolic rates than we ground-based mammals, but along with that they also have much longer life spans than you might expect given their size. So the thinking goes, the evolutionary adjustments to mitochondria, the power plants of the cell, that were needed for flight have also produced a greater resistance to the mitochondrial molecular damage that contributes to aging. As this open ac...
Source: Fight Aging! - September 12, 2016 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
TWiV 296: Influenza viruses with Peter Palese
Vincent speaks with Peter Palese about his illustrious career in virology, from early work on neuraminidases to universal influenza virus vaccines, on episode #396 of the science show This Week in Virology.
You can find TWiV #396 at microbe.tv/twiv, or listen below.
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Download TWiV 396 (54 MB .mp3, 74 min)
Subscribe (free): iTunes, RSS, email (Source: virology blog)
Source: virology blog - July 3, 2016 Category: Virology Authors: Vincent Racaniello Tags: This Week in Virology aerosol transmission ferret Flu gain of function H5N1 influenza influenza virus neuraminidase relenza swine flu tamiflu universal vaccine viral viruses Source Type: blogs
TWiV 396: Influenza viruses with Peter Palese
Vincent speaks with Peter Palese about his illustrious career in virology, from early work on neuraminidases to universal influenza virus vaccines, on episode #396 of the science show This Week in Virology.
You can find TWiV #396 at microbe.tv/twiv, or listen below.
Click arrow to play
Download TWiV 396 (54 MB .mp3, 74 min)
Subscribe (free): iTunes, RSS, email (Source: virology blog)
Source: virology blog - July 3, 2016 Category: Virology Authors: Vincent Racaniello Tags: This Week in Virology aerosol transmission ferret Flu gain of function H5N1 influenza influenza virus neuraminidase relenza swine flu tamiflu universal vaccine viral viruses Source Type: blogs
Killing Zika Virus Carrying Mosquitoes with Gene Drives?
Genetically engineering out the lives of pests is not a new idea. The idea of leveraging sexual reproduction to pass specific gene changes (mutations or alterations) through entire populations to control pests has been proposed as far back as the 1940s, for example, A Strain of the Mosquito Aedes aegypti Selected for Susceptibility to the Avian Malaria Parasite Plasmodium lophurae.
Evolutionary geneticist Austin Burt was credited with the method of cutting DNA to reduce populations of disease-spreading species and the associated idea of “Gene drives”. The central idea behind a gene drive is to ensure that the engineere...
Source: NAKEDMEDICINE.COM - June 27, 2016 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Jane Chin Tags: Science and Research Source Type: blogs
“What if giant fireflies flew in clusters of hundreds?...
"What if giant fireflies flew in clusters of hundreds? What if fireworks could change direction at will? What if the lights of the New York skyline suddenly took to the air? For 6 weekends, beginning next Thursday at the @bklynnavyyard, more than 2,000 #pigeons will put on an avian-powered light show. The performance, "Fly By Night," is artist @dukerileystudio's valentine to the city, its historic shoreline, its oft-maligned spirit animal and the vanishing world of rooftop pigeon fanciers. With the help of @creativetimenyc, @dukerileystudio spent about half a year assembling his performers. He uses a whistle and a long bam...
Source: Kidney Notes - April 28, 2016 Category: Urology & Nephrology Authors: Joshua Schwimmer Source Type: blogs
“It’s been a year since the avian flu tore through the...
"It's been a year since the avian flu tore through the Midwest: enough time for decimated farms to cash their indemnity checks and begin buying replacement birds; for the wholesale price of eggs, which doubled, to slide back to normal; for national awareness of the outbreak, the worst animal-disease epidemic in U.S. history, to dissipate. @damon_c photographed a turkey at a family farm in Iowa, the worst-hit state. Brothers Brad and Grant Moline lost 56,000 birds in the outbreak. Their farm was the first allowed to restock once it was over. Among the farmers who endured the bird flu, and others watching, there is a pervasi...
Source: Kidney Notes - April 13, 2016 Category: Urology & Nephrology Authors: Joshua Schwimmer Source Type: blogs
Tamiflu For All? Evidence Of Morbidity In CDC’s Antiviral Guidelines
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has boiled down its public health campaign against influenza to a single slogan: “Take 3.” Vaccines, everyday preventive actions like handwashing, and influenza antivirals.
Last year, because of a mismatch between the vaccine and circulating virus, the message was reduced to—essentially—“Take 1,” as the CDC emphatically promoted oseltamivir (Tamiflu) for treating disease. The agency has stated: “Antiviral flu medicines are underutilized. If you get them early, they could keep you out of the hospital and might even save your life.”
The CDC is one ...
Source: Health Affairs Blog - March 31, 2016 Category: Health Management Authors: Peter Doshi, Kenneth Mandl and Florence Bourgeois Tags: Drugs and Medical Technology Featured Global Health Health Professionals Public Health Quality CDC clinical trials drug safety FDA influenza Physicians Prevention Research vaccines Source Type: blogs
The End of Civilization and the Real Donald Trump
By ART CAPLAN
The pandemic started quietly. In the spring of 2017 A few hundred dead chickens appeared in markets in Hong Kong and a few other cities in China. Public health officials in China were slow to respond. They did not want to panic the public about an avian flu outbreak. Nor were they eager to take the steps necessary to contain such an outbreak—the killing hundreds of thousands of chickens and poultry with devastating economic consequences. While the delay went on a few cases began to occur on Canadian and American poultry farms. Department of Agriculture experts traced the outbreak to waterfowl ...
Source: The Health Care Blog - March 15, 2016 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: John Irvine Tags: 2016 Election Uncategorized CDC Donald Trump Pandemic of 2017 Source Type: blogs
Moving beyond metagenomics to find the next pandemic virus
I was asked to write a commentary for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences to accompany an article entitled SARS-like WIV1-CoV poised for human emergence. I’d like to explain why I wrote it and why I spent the last five paragraphs railing against regulating gain-of-function experiments.
Towards the end of 2014 the US government announced a pause of gain-of-function research involving research on influenza virus, SARS virus, and MERS virus that “may be reasonably anticipated to confer attributes to influenza, MERS, or SARS viruses such that the virus would have enhanced pathogenicity and/or tra...
Source: virology blog - March 14, 2016 Category: Virology Authors: Vincent Racaniello Tags: Basic virology Commentary Information aerosol transmission benefits coronavirus ferret gain of function H5N1 influenza MERS metagenomics moratorium pathogenicity pause risks SARS viral viruses Source Type: blogs
TWiV 377: Chicken with a side of Zika
On episode #377 of the science show This Week in Virology, the TWiVniks review the past week’s findings on Zika virus and microcephaly, and reveal a chicken protein that provides insight on the restriction of transmission of avian influenza viruses to humans.
You can find TWiV #377 at microbe.tv/twiv, or you can listen below.
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Download TWiV 377 (70 MB .mp3, 95 min)
Subscribe (free): iTunes, RSS, email (Source: virology blog)
Source: virology blog - February 21, 2016 Category: Virology Authors: Vincent Racaniello Tags: This Week in Virology amniotic fluid ANP32A avian influenza H5N1 host protein host restriction larvicide microcephaly ocular defects pyriproxifen RNA polymerase semen species restriction TORCH viral virus viruses zika v Source Type: blogs
Influenza
Qinghua Wang and Yizhi Jane Tao present a new book on Influenza: Current Research Following on from their highly-acclaimed 2010 book, Drs. Wang and Tao present a new, up-to-date and comprehensive review of current advancements in molecular influenza virology. Topics covered include: stem-specific broadly neutralizing antibodies to the virus hemagglutinin; virus replication and transcription; influenza B virus hemagglutinin; influenza A virus ribonucleoprotein complex; regulation of the virus replication machinery by host factors; evolution of receptor specificity of influenza A virus hemagglutinin: PB1-F2, a multi-function...
Source: Microbiology Blog: The weblog for microbiologists. - February 5, 2016 Category: Microbiology Source Type: blogs
On the twelfth day of Christmas my journals gave to me…
This study published in BMC Evolutionary Biology in particular focused on piranhas and aimed to determine the evolutionary lineage of such a characteristic.
Eleven: Cpipe pipelines
Overview of Cpipe workflow, click to enlargeSadedin et al., 2015
A software article from Genome Medicine reports the implementation of Cpipe. This is an exome analysis pipeline designed specifically for clinical genetic disease diagnostics. Its aim is to provide fast, effective and reproducible analysis, while also being highly flexible and customizable to meet the individual needs of diverse clinical settings.
This is vital, as clinical implem...
Source: BioMed Central Blog - December 22, 2015 Category: Journals (General) Authors: Sophie Marchant Tags: Biology Health Medicine Source Type: blogs
