Recently thousands of dead and decaying pigs were pulled from rivers in Shanghai and Jiaxing, China. Apparently farmers dumped the animals into the water after the pigs became ill. Porcine circovirus has been detected in the in pig carcasses and in the water. Porcine circoviruses are small, icosahedral viruses that were discovered in 1974 as …
Viruses are obligate intracellular parasites, which means that they must enter a cell to reproduce. As virions are too large to diffuse passively across the plasma membrane, cellular pathways for uptake of extracellular materials provide entry routes. The first step in entry is adherence of virus particles to the membrane, an interaction mediated by binding …
Each year as I teach my undergraduate virology course, I record each lecture and put them online where they are freely accessible. You can find the 2013 lectures here at virology blog and on iTunes U. The complete 2012 course lectures are also available (virology blog and iTunes). And don’t forget Virologia en Español, a …
The risk of being infected with human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) is substantially enhanced in individuals with other sexually transmitted diseases. For example, infection with herpes simplex virus type 2 (HSV-2) increases the risk ratio of acquiring HIV from 2 to 4. Explanations for this increased risk include direct inoculation of HIV-1 into the …
Antimicrobial peptides induced by herpesvirus enhance HIV-1 infection Read More »
Harvard University is home to some of the world’s finest virologists. But apparently they do not communicate with the writers at Harvard Magazine, where a botched story on the avian H5N1 influenza virus has just been published. The problems begin with the first paragraph: But when Dutch researchers recently created an even more deadly strain …
Harvard University: Great virology, bad science writing Read More »
In a brief letter to Biosecurity and Bioterrorism, Alan Zelicoff notes a problem with serosurveys for influenza H5N1 infection: …peak titers after H5N1 infection occur at about 4 to 6 weeks postinfection and may drop by as much as 32-fold over the course of a year, probably decreasing the sensitivity of serologic testing for past …
