October 2015

TRIAL BY ERROR: The Troubling Case of the PACE Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Study

203 Comments / Uncategorized / By

By David Tuller, DrPH David Tuller is academic coordinator of the concurrent masters degree program in public health and journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.  A few years ago, Dr. Racaniello let me hijack this space for a long piece about the CDC’s persistent incompetence in its efforts to address the devastating illness the …

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TWiV 359: A Blossom by any other name

This Week in Virology / By

On episode #359 of the science show This Week in Virology, Vincent speaks with Blossom about her laboratory’s research on Kaposi’s sarcoma-associated herpesvirus, including how it transforms cells, the switch between lytic and latent replication, and its interaction with the innate immune system of the host. You can find TWiV #359 at www.microbe.tv/twiv.

Prion contamination in the emergency room

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Here is a follow-up to last week’s article that described a case of variant Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease in a Texas resident caused by ingestion of BSE-contaminated beef 14 years ago. A 59 year old male patient was admitted to the trauma unit in Lancaster, PA with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. There was substantial bleeding and brain tissue extrusion …

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A case of prion disease acquired from contaminated beef

6 Comments / Basic virology, Information / By

Spongiform encephalopathies are neurodegenerative diseases caused by misfolding of normal cellular prion proteins. A 2014 case of variant Creutzfeldt-Jacob prion disease in the United States was probably caused by eating beef from animals with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or mad cow disease. Human spongiform encephalopathies are placed into three groups: infectious, familial or genetic, and sporadic, distinguished by how the disease …

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